Mars
by JadeRabbyt
Summary: After an explosive disaster, Danny finds himself alone. Old dreams mingle with new obsessions, drawing him inexplicably skyward.
1. Prelude

Mars

By JadeRabbyt

"I don't want to talk about it."  
-Daniel Fenton (1)

The bricks clashed and clattered all around him as the walls caved in and the ectoplasmic canisters exploded, spraying shrapnel everywhere. Danny gasped as a piece of it nicked his arm while another buried itself in his thigh. He didn't understand. He'd just been goofing around… He heard screams like squeaks through the collapse.

"Tucker! Sam!" Danny zapped into ghost mode and faded intangible. Steel struts fell across him while rubble of brick and wood showered down like rain. The dust began to billow and the smoke began to rise and Danny couldn't see anything at all.

"Come on you guys, let me hear you!"

Every breath held the poison stench of burning paint and metal, every gulp of air choked down with hyperventilated panic. Danny zipped through the labs, ducking around flowering explosions of chemicals and sparking electrical jets, past and through the frying computers and bursting tanks.

"Guys!"

Danny's legs turned to rubber as his heart leapt to his throat. Metal groaned above and beneath him like a dying man, a groan that tilted and creaked and gasped and writhed, the remaining ceiling supports flexed like silver snakes, and Danny opened his mouth in a scream he never managed as the Fenton Works collapsed atop him.

His eyes closed themselves as the world erupted in a cataclysmic symphony of brick and wood and metal and wire, an orchestra of explosions and firey blasts of heat and gas that scorched his face and made Danny screw his eyes shut tighter. His fists trembled, clenched at his sides, and the world trembled all around him, the crashing cement damping out the sharp crack of concrete against brick as it buried him, buried him alive.

Danny couldn't focus. Visions of their terror-stricken faces flashed in his brain like lighting, overexposed pictures showing the startled sheen in her flying hair and her amethyst eyes opened wide in dawning realization, and Tucker—his hands reaching to clasp over his hat as he started to yell for help. Danny stood frozen, hands on his ears, eyes shut tight. He couldn't save them; there was nothing now to be done now, nothing…

And Danny's home tumbled down around him.

After a time, there was quiet. A few chunks rattled and scraped, settling themselves and coming to a stable arrangement, and then there was stillness. Danny opened his eyes. It was dark, and the darkness was thick and stifling, broken only by a few slivers of light that had managed to seep through the cracks, lighting up the dust to cut wispy tunnels through the formless darkness. Danny made himself move, resisting the urge to run, refusing to punch the panic button. He couldn't leave it to someone else. These were his friends. Besides, maybe they hadn't…

Danny unstuck himself from his place in the rubble, a ghost among ruins, and silently drifted through it, sifted through it.

"Sam. Tuck," he murmured. His voice rattled off into nothing. It was impossible to see anything. Danny lit up his hands, letting the soft glow illuminate the pockets in the rubble. Broken pipes plinked water, and a few live wires writhed. Danny's mouth fell open a crack. Numbly he moved through the rubble, guided by nothing, searching for nothing.

Time stretched on immeasurably, and he began to hear sirens. Sirens and voices, but he didn't want to go up just yet. Danny' eyes wandered over the ruins, over a jagged pyramid of twisted metal that swirled with green reflections under his light. He peered into a shadowed hole just beneath it. He bent for a closer look, brightening his plasma. He saw, and he jerked away only to creep forward and look again; his knees trembled. He blinked and tears streamed down. He spoke something softly, so softly, a question with no answer but silence.

The taste of acid seeped into his throat as realization broke through confusion, and then Danny did run. He raced through the dirt and into the sky, away from the city and across fields untamed, streaking out and above and across the world looking for an escape that did not exist, a ghost of the earth with his eyes on the untouchable stars.

(1) All statements presented to the NASA Board of Directors, circa 2015. Comment reported by Madeline Fenton.

* * *

A/N: Intrigued? Confused? Worried/hoping that this is another one of those hopelessly depressing fics? Drop a review, and don't miss the second chapter. Constructive criticism welcome. 


	2. Aftermath

A/N: 'WWW' means a scene change.

Mars

By JadeRabbyt

"He was really bad those first couple days after the accident—and everybody knew it was an accident. Danny wouldn't even make eye contact with us. After about a week he seemed a little better, but whatever went on those first couple days left a mark. That accident, the guilt he must have felt… He never really got over it."  
-Jazmine Fenton

Jazz walked down the hallway, feeling a little sick at the feel of the rough carpet beneath her feet. She'd always had the thicker, poofier kind back at home, the kind where you could swing your feet out of bed and wiggle the thick threads between your toes before setting out to take what the day had to give you. She hadn't thought about that side of it in years, of course, but she missed it now.

She padded down the carpets to the kitchen where her grandmother was already making breakfast, flopping gooey french toast around on the stove.

Her grandmother flashed a bright smile of false teeth. "Mornin' hon." Gray curls bounced down to frame her face, the corners of her eyes tilting up and creasing with sympathetic wrinkles.

Jazz sat, leaning her elbows on the table and resting her chin in her fists. "Good morning." She tried to sound perky, failing utterly in her own ears. Jazz's dreams had been after her about the explosion again. She'd have to remember to pick up a book about dreams later at the library.

Grandma flopped the toast into the serving plate at her elbow. "Is Danny up yet?"

"Don't think so." There was another thing she was going to have to do, talk to Danny. He'd been moping around all weekend, still avoiding everyone, and she'd hardly had a chance to sit down with him. She'd almost expected him to come to her, but so far, no dice. The funerals had taken a lot out of him. They'd taken a lot out of everybody.

Coffee burbled and bounced in its glass pot, speaking cheerful gibberish to her from its place on the white-tile counter. Jazz raised a skeptical eyebrow at it, watching the black murk jump around like a caffeinated Mexican hat-dancer. She sighed and got up for a cup of it, adding milk and a couple spoons of sugar from the ceramic jar nearby. The bubbling black settled down into a milky brown, and Jazz leaned her back against the fridge as Grandma dunked another piece of bread into a bowl of beaten eggs, flicking it into the pan where it hissed softly.

"Penny for your thoughts, dear?" asked Grandma from the stove. She glanced up at Jazz, a half-smile playing on her face.

"Well, I don't know." Jazz swirled her coffee, watching the steaming drink climb the sides of her mug. "I'll probably talk to Danny today."

Grandma bobbed her head, resting the spatula against the pan. "That would be good for you both, I think." She sighed, shaking her head. "I tried, but he keeps talking in riddles."

"Yeah, he does that sometimes."

Grandma's skirt swished as she picked up the spatula again. "Well I'm sure you'll do better than I."

Jazz shrugged. "I guess." She certainly wasn't going to try it until later in the afternoon. Her brother was a little jumpy in the mornings, these days.

WWW

Danny woke up staring into the rafters of the old house. They almost seemed to flex, shine gray…

He shot bolt upright in bed, breathing hard, fingers clutching the sheets of the mattress under him. Across from him, an old, carved oak chest of drawers squatted calmly on carved feet, the knobs of its drawers like buttons on a patrician's suit. Danny whipped around, his glance alighting on a variety of eccentric furniture stashed helter-skelter about the attic, a lamp with a shade of green glass, a square wooden chest with a scrap of fabric drooping out the top, and an old, half-finished model plane hanging from the ceiling. He was up in the attic. Danny sighed and let himself drop back on the wrinkled sheets as he studied the plane, its balsa-wood fuselage naked of paint or other decoration, several rounded posts jutting from its sides where the wings might sit if it had any.

How many days since, he wondered. Nine. It was Saturday, at—he checked the hands of the wall-hanging clock—six thirty, give or take a minute. It was that stupid window next to his bed that had woken him. It faced north, so the sun didn't shine directly in, but the glare of the blue sky was more than enough to wake a guy up. It made for a blissfully benign alarm clock on school days, but on weekends it was a little much. And of course he couldn't bring himself to pull the shudders at night. The sky was too fantastic for that, and besides, pulling the shudders on the night sky, the moon and all those stars, was a little like pulling the shudders on them. But he had no problems blocking out the daylight, especially on the weekend.

Danny jerked the vinyl cord, sending the Venetian blinds clattering down, and rolled over to hug his pillow for a little more sleep.

WWW

Out in the country there were few lights to pollute the night, but in the thick of the city there was always some kind of distraction. People bustled down dirty sidewalks, kicking aside the wayward napkin or scrap of newspaper as they brushed by one another, hurrying away for work, errands, or, most pleasantly, entertainment.

The city was full of tall high-risers labeled only with numbers. The shops on the street floor were loudly announced, but always there were dark windows on the many floors above. From the street, the upper floors look abandoned, but inside they were packed with apartments and offices, activity felt by the public but hardly ever publicly witnessed, a situation perfect for the Fenton's temporary purposes.

"Do you really think he's alright?" Maddie lifted a tube of ruby fluid to the light as she spoke. It glimmered back at her, the transparent solution apparently pure. She'd have to give it another spectrograph to be sure. "Jazz has been saying we should look for a counselor."

Jack flipped up the welder's mask, examining his own handiwork on an aluminum component. "Jazz is always saying that, and Danny comes through fine." He replaced the mask and picked up the torch.

Maddie glared at him. "This is different, Jack, and Danny has been acting strange lately. I worry about him. We should be doing something."

"We have." Jack removed the mask with a curt flick and set the torch down again. "We took two days off work and let him off from school. We let him rent movies and lounge around and then we put him back in school to 'give him some normalcy.' We're using this nearby junky lab, even though the university offered us that new fancy one that was farther away, and we agreed to get home every day by five. What more are we supposed to be doing?"

The red fluid, a new compound Maddie had been preparing all day, slipped from her fingers and cracked on the worn linoleum. She wiped the back of her glove across her forehead. "I don't know."

"My point exactly." Jack slammed the mask over his face and went back to work with the heavy acetylene welder.

Maddie chewed her lip, more confused than upset at the moment in spite of the spill. "He isn't talking to us, and he doesn't have any other close friends," she murmured. Jack wouldn't be able to hear her over the welder's racket. "Which leaves Jazz." Maddie had a great deal of confidence in her daughter's psychiatric abilities for others, but this time the patient was family. Sooner or later Jazz was bound to try something; Maddie just hoped that everything turned out OK.

WWW

The books thumped along in the back seat as Jazz maneuvered the car around several of the larger pot holes. Their grandmother didn't exactly live in the wilderness, but it wasn't quite civilization either. They had neighbors, but they lived the city equivalent of a couple houses down. The developers had gotten their hands on the land just recently, and the smooth fields were being mapped out, slowly but surely, with homes and streets, perfect for everybody's soccer ball-kicking six-year-old. Jazz wasn't sorry they hadn't paved this road, but of course they wouldn't have; Grandma's old house had been around since the Stone Age, and so had its dirt road.

She spotted the building up ahead and drummed her fingers on the wheel. It was an old house, but not bitterly so. The paint was aged but not peeling, the front lawn a little untended but by no means ratty. Grandma liked her dandelions, Dad had said. Jazz's eyes gravitated irresistibly to the attic window, a wide square fixture with its blinds down, peering blindly out over the gray-shingled porch roof, street, and the country beyond. Her fingers pattered a little faster on the wheel, clenching it and unclenching it as she bumped down the road. Whether he was ready for it or not, she and Danny were going to have to have a talk.

Jazz parked the car and lugged out her six hardbacks, which gave her a certain satisfaction. A big, thick stack of books meant there was work to be done, and where there was work to be done there was progress to be made. She rested them on an elevated knee while she coaxed the door into unlocking, and once inside she stumbled up to her room, formerly known as the TV room. Another thing about Grandma: her TV was the size of a toaster. The sight of the little thing had been Jazz's first clue that the move couldn't possibly be too terrible.

She took a nervous preemptive flip-through of a book on child psychology, lightly perusing it until it occurred to her that they wouldn't have anything on super-powered little brothers, and besides, if she needed step-by-step instructions from a book she was already dead meat anyway. So Jazz stashed her books on an empty chair, took a deep breath, and headed into the hallway.

The attic stairs could be extended by pulling a ring in a panel of the ceiling, and a strict procedure of knocking before entering had been established and enforced by both Danny and his parents. Jazz reached up and tapped the panel.

"Can I help you?"

She nearly jumped out of her skin. Danny stood right behind her, a bored look on his face and some old papers in his hand.

Jazz recovered "Yeah. Look, Danny, we need to talk."

The bored expression disappeared, anxiety sweeping in. "Talk?"

"I'm worried."

Danny rolled his eyes, his posture relaxing. "Everybody's worried. I'm fine, really. Just because… Tucker and Sam…" He started to blank. There was no other way to put it. Danny melted for a second, his eyes drooping, limbs going slack, face turning oh-so-slightly down…

Then a slight tremor rippled through him, hardly visible at all, really, and he was fine. "Everybody's overreacting. Mom and Dad already have a house checked out, and after a while it'll be like it never happened. Really."

Jazz blinked. She'd never seen anything like it, but her memory proffered a morbidly diverse series of explanations. Post-traumatic stress disorder headed the list, and Jazz had been pretty sure he'd had that one to begin with, but after that one there was always low-grade schizophrenia, clinical depression, maybe epilepsy, and a handful of others. Jazz got herself under control. "I think you might be underestimating things."

"Whatever. You want to see the basement?"

It took her a moment to register that one. "What?"

"The basement." Danny grinned, seizing the opening. "Grandma's got all this really neat stuff packed away down there." He held out the papers to her. "See?"

Obscure directions and a few diagrams spread themselves over the packet, the pages crackling and yellowed with age. "What's this?"

"Instructions for that old plane up in the attic. There's a whole kit down there, and a box of tools and stuff nearby. I bet I could finish it."

Jazz added bipolar disorder to the list, although that one was a little far-fetched. It was supposed to be mostly genetic, after all, but then so were most of the others. Jazz canceled that train of thought before it got any further. "You want to finish it?"

"Sure. It's not like anybody else is doing anything with it." He reached for the ladder's pull ring.

Jazz put a hand on his arm. "Danny, stop."

He frowned and looked up at her. "What is it?"

"I know who you are. I know you can turn ghost."

A thick silence passed. Danny gulped, retracting his arm and averting his face. "I don't know what you're talking about."

"I saw you changing, once. I know you're Inviso-Bill, or whatever the press calls you."

Danny rubbed the back of his head, letting out a slow sigh. Jazz put an awkward hand on his shoulder, but he shrugged her off. Jazz licked her lips and put her hands in her pockets. "It's alright, Danny."

"No it's not," he muttered.

"Really, I don't-"

"I got Sam and Tucker," Danny began, his eyes flashing erratically. "-My two best friends, KILLED because of this stupid 'hero' stuff I do. That's not alright!" His shoulders shook, and he pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes as his mouth twisted into a tight grimace.

Jazz reached out impulsively to hug him, but she thought better of it and folded her shaking hands instead. What to say to Danny, what to tell the parents, what not to tell the parents, why did this have to happen to _her_ little brother…

They both waited. Jazz looked away, blushing and feeling shamefully helpless, and Danny stood there shaking, trying to deal with whatever demons he kept in his own way. At last he took his hands away and grasped the stairs' ring.

"Maybe you can show me the plane later?" Jazz asked quietly.

Danny, already halfway up, looked down at her. "Sure. Later." He yanked up the ladder and slammed the panel shut.

* * *

A/N: Wow, I got readers! Glad to hear you like my style, Mujitsu Yume. I've been playing around with it, and it's nice to know the effort pays off. Thanks everybody for the reviews. Hopefully this chapter cleared things up a bit for the befuddled among you. Please review and tell me what you think of it. 


	3. Lowerclassman

Mars

By JadeRabbyt

"Nobody understood him... That was all. He never found anybody to confide in after his friends were gone." –Alicia Carmichael

Danny tried his best to appear casual as he glanced over at Dash's table. The jock was messing around with his friends, six of them—plus girls, of course. They all sat hunched around the lunch table, discussing the latest trends, games, or gossip. Bunched up like that, they looked like a cluster of big blonde tomatoes. Danny grinned at the image. Actually, make that _snickering_ blonde tomatoes; one of them had just accidentally-on-purpose bounced a couple peas off a girl's scarlet shirt. She squealed, brushed herself off and whirled around to slap at the pea-shooting offender, her silky brown hair quivering with indignation as the others laughed and poked playful fun at her.

Danny watched them for a moment more. He looked back at his own lunch, a mess of cafeteria food that would have been fresh in the Paleolithic Era. His peas looked more like discolored deer dooky than laughable projectiles. Danny was getting sick of eating with the Charity Crowd.

Across the table, Alicia pouted at the sight of his displeasure. Her paper bag rustled as she pulled out a sandwich. "Come on, Danny. You don't need them."

Danny grumbled something intelligible and popped a tater-tot in his mouth. It may be true that he didn't exactly need the popular crowd—although he'd really like to be in it, but he definitely didn't need Alicia or any of the other emotion leeches who'd gravitated to him over the last month. They kept trying to get him to 'talk about his feelings,' but so far as Danny was concerned there was nothing to talk about. At the beginning they had been okay, just people to hang out with, but they'd gotten bolder lately. Something bad had happened to him, but it wasn't like talking about it would change it or fix it.

But that didn't stop the Charity Crowd. In fact, it looked like Alicia was getting ready to start up on that same tired theme, again. Behind her coke-bottle glasses, her eyes were getting that wobbly googly look, and her hand had begun to creep toward his own.

Danny announced that he had to get something from his locker. "Sorry. Gotta finish some homework." He cleaned up his half-eaten lunch and stood.

Alicia sighed. "Alright, Danny." Her glance accused him of ingratitude and standoffishness before returning to her sandwich.

That was another thing that annoyed him. Alicia was nice… but jeez could she ever get nosey sometimes. At least Jazz knew when to quit. Danny dumped the rest of his food in the garbage and left the clamoring lunchroom, drifting through the halls with his hands in his pockets. He was really going to have to make some new friends.

XXX

"Get lost, Fentina."

"Dash, I was talking to Kwan. Besides, I just wanted to know if, I could, you know, hang out with you guys or something. We could go to the Nasty Burger, my treat!"

"Look geek, just because you had a little accident with your other friends doesn't mean I have to be all nice to you now."

"That wasn't my fault."

"Sure it wasn't, Butterfingers. You know there's a reason they won't let you touch glass in biology anymore."

"It wasn't my fault!"

"Dash, you're being really mean. Come on, knock it off and let's go."

"I wasn't talking to you _Valerie_. Besides, just look at him! Running away like a baby. I should kick his butt."

"What is WRONG with you? Danny's best friends were killed!"

"Pfft, whatever. He's being a wimp about it."

XXX

Danny went home and spread the blueprints over the table. He'd almost finished the wings. His desk, formerly junked up with everything from soda pop cans to unfinished or overdue homework assignments, had been devoted exclusively to miniature aviation. The desk, a hard plywood affair painted in glossy white, was poorly suited to the pricks of t-pins, which were required to hold down the blueprints and keep the wood from moving around as glue dried.

The yellowed blueprints recommended corkboard for the job. Danny didn't have any corkboard. One day, a slow day on a Friday, when everyone had their bodies in school and their heads in the weekend, Danny slinked into wood shop and, very discreetly, struck up a conversation with one of the kids in both wood shop and his English class. The kid almost blew him off. Danny's reputation for strangeness preceded him, but after explaining what he needed and what a minor task it would be, the kid agreed to help him. It took four lunch periods, less but for the clubs and social activities of his patron, but Danny managed to get a simple corkboard panel set up, mounted on plywood to keep it perfectly flat and perfect for plane-building.

He kept the instruction booklet and the tools in a cardboard box under his desk. The delicate balsa wood required only a pen knife, making the work quiet and relatively simple. The blueprints, when not in use, stood in a corner between the desk and the wall. The ancient fuselage hung from a wire from his ceiling, strung from a hook Danny himself had installed himself, and the unfinished wings lay spread across the corkboard panel atop his desk like the skeletal frame of a dinosaur.

When Danny got home from school that day, back to the house too new to be a home, he thumped up the stairs and into his room and closed the door behind him. Throwing his backpack on the bed he caught a flash of sky blue out the window and paused, perusing it, before moving to the desk. He pulled out the blueprints and the instruction booklet, searching for where he'd left off.

A tear dropped from his face onto the crinkled pages. Danny smeared it away with his thumb and reached for the toolbox under his desk.

XXX

Alicia brushed a stray strand of blonde hair from her eyes, assuming a casual stance against a locker next to Karen, an older student. A junior. Alicia's olive green purse dangled from her fingers as she watched the students pour by, looking for a certain fellow freshman and not finding him. Next to her, Karen dialed in her locker combination and popped it open.

Alicia had badminton practice in fifteen minutes, so this would have to be quick. "Hey, have you seen Danny around?"

Karen pulled out a couple textbooks and binders, cramming them into their backpack. "No." She groaned as she slung the weighty thing over her shoulder. "Ugh. Can you believe this? I have, like, six assignments in English and AP Chemistry. Good thing it's almost summer."

Alicia laughed. "No kidding. But about Danny…"

"Why? What's wrong with the little weirdo this time?"

"Hey, he's _not _a weirdo."

Karen rolled her eyes. "Look, I didn't say he was a psychopath. I just said the guy's a little… odd."

"I guess that's true." She had to admit, Danny had changed. Before his friends… left him, he'd been a much happier kid. Alicia could recall seeing him content or cheerful or worried in the hallways back when Sam and Tucker were alive, but lately he'd been far less emotional. Not robotic, just passive. He seldom laughed, and was pleased more than happy, perturbed more than upset. He'd also stopped trying to break into social groups; Danny didn't talk to people, and people didn't talk to him. While there were recluses running around the school, they'd been that way ever since anybody could remember. Danny, on the other hand, had acquired the habit over two weeks, and it was that more than anything that made him seem strange. Alicia had had to work in order to befriend him after the accident.

But lately, Danny had been leaving her in the dark. "He's stopped hanging out with me…"

Karen laughed. "Girl, you practically stalked him for a while there. Maybe he wants space."

Alicia shook her head. "Even you should realize that there's more to it than that."

"Even me, huh?" Karen turned, her straight blonde hair falling stringently around her face, her critical eyes and sharp, practical nose directed at Alicia. "Well, something pretty awful happened. Maybe something permanent happened to him as a result. So what? With the way he was before, something like this was pretty much bound to happen sooner or later." She slammed her locker shut. "Nobody's hopeful all the time, all their life."

"But the way he was before… It's just not right for him to be this way."

"You know, maybe Danny wasn't the only one around here with a nasty surprise coming." She put a hand on Alica's shoulder. "I like you, but you need to learn that bad things happen. You can't carry everybody's crosses for them."

Alicia pinched her mouth into a hard line. "Excuse me. I've got to get to practice."

Karen watched her go. "See you later."

XXX

While the high school roiled with its own eternal dramas, the mayor of Amity had become very unhappy for a very specific reason. His unhappiness, communicated to various members of his staff and the two ghost-hunting Fentons, arose from the general unhappiness of his own voting citizens. It seemed a virulent outbreak of ghost scares was sweeping the town, the reports of which he would never have taken seriously were it not for a previous incident involving the possession of just about every one of the aforementioned tax-paying citizens several months ago.

So the Fentons were the people for the job. The mayor had confidence in their ability to solve the crisis, given how the last time they'd been commissioned they had, apparently, come out successful. The details never came out, and that repugnant Inviso Bill had been left at large, but at least the problem had gone away. The mayor trusted that the Fentons could do the same, preferably in a more efficient manner, with the present situation.

Imagine his dismay at finding that the two people he'd hired to solve the problem were also its primary contributors.

Jack and Maddie sat in the stiff armless chairs as the mayor expressed his incredible displeasure. Several days later, they were sitting in court. On the mayor's recommendation a municipal judge fined them and forbade them from operating the Ghost Portal; also, they could not pursue their research or hold jobs in institutions which studied supernatural elements. The court issued an informal suggestion that they aspire to no more than the position of world's most overeducated TV repairmen.

Jack dragged himself home and flicked on the television. Upon hearing the news, Jazz nearly had a seizure. She shouted about her college and her future; Maddie let her shout; in the end Jazz flew up to her room and slammed the door. Danny took it better. He got the whole story from his mother, about the mayor and the ruling, then padded up to his room in that quiet way of his. He'd looked sad, but not overly depressed. Maddie could hear Jazz crying, but Danny's room was quiet—probably up there working on his plane. Maddie still didn't like that quietness. But she had gotten used to it.

Next, Maddie checked phone book and internet for a lawyer who might at least delay the ruling's provisions until she could get a plan together. Their income came mostly from grants, and with the research gone, so was the money. They owned a nice chunk of stock in companies which had bought the rights to a couple ghost hunting devices, but that wouldn't last long. Maddie would fight the ruling, but to be honest, she wasn't hopeful.

She could call it an honest mistake all she liked, but the fact of the matter was that both she and Jack had been irresponsible, and it had caused innocent people damage. She just hoped the city wouldn't make them pay for it.

XXX

After months of legal hassles, Maddie got a job teaching electrical engineering at a local junior college. Jack grudgingly entered the private sector as an automotive technician. The income went down, but the family survived. Jazz availed herself to a wealth of scholarships the following year, and Danny survived with fewer toys. Computer games and new clothes had become less important to him.

XXX

Danny held the remote in both hands, guiding the delicate plane in circles and dives through the air. He stood near the thin concrete runway, surrounded by a healthy field that shimmered in the light breeze while the distant sounds of the highway rumbling in the distance. The plane's gas motor buzzed, and the clear sky and bright sun made for perfect flying weather.

The plane had really turned out great. The painted flames looked really cool against its shiny black fuselage. This was its fourth time out, and he was getting better and better at landings. No crashes yet. Danny only regretted that there wasn't anybody else around. Not often, but every once in a while somebody else would show up with a plane, and then they'd have races or do tricks or just strut the talents of their machines.

Flying alone was alright, though. Danny had been trying to get his plane to do a loop-the-loop, but it was tricky. The plane kept wanting to angle sideways, and Danny didn't want to risk a crash. Aileron controllers weren't cheap.

"So this is what you do with your free time now?"

Danny jumped at the voice. He turned to see the fanged smirk of his former foe, Mister Vlad Plasmius.

Danny sighed and returned his attention to the plane. "What are you doing here, Vlad."

Vlad floated in front of him, his red and white cape rippling. "Is it true you've given up the game? That you've stopped fighting ghosts for good?"

Danny scowled at him and stepped to the side, back in sight of his plane. So much for a loop-the-loop. "'The game' stopped being fun a while before people started to die."

"You mean your friends?"

Danny didn't answer, continuing to thumb the controls of his plane.

"I see. So, you're not even going to try to help out your parents, miserable wretches that they are these days. You're just going to spend your life sulking, pursuing the promising career of checkout clerk, is that right?" Vlad laughed. "By the way, how _is _the supermarket industry doing these days?"

Danny jerked his head toward the plane. "It pays." He looked askance at Vlad. "My parents are doing just fine."

"I'm sure they are."

Danny was keeping an eye on him, but he was far more engrossed in that blasted plane. Vlad followed it around the sky, watching it dive and twist in the blue as Danny worked the controls, trying different spins and flight paths. The craft had a kind of dignified rattiness which characterized most home-built models, but it really didn't look all that terrible. "You built it?"

Danny smiled. "That's right."

"Are you going to be a pilot?"

He shrugged. "I don't know."

"Well, what are you going to do?"

"Why do you care?" Danny turned the plane in a tight circle. "Shouldn't you be trying to devise some evil plot to marry my mother, anyway? Holding up a bank or shoving old ladies out in traffic? Or was Dateline extra boring last night so you thought you'd drop by and harass me for a change." He shook his head, muttering just loud enough to be heard. "Like I don't have enough to deal with."

Vlad's eyes flashed. "So it's true. Instead of a bouncy little brat you're now a moody little brat. I bet you haven't 'gone ghost' in months, is that right?" Again, Danny didn't answer. "How'd you like it if I turned your little embarrassment up there into kindling?"

"Try it, and I'll break your legs."

Vlad chuckled. So it was possible to get a rise out of him, petty though it was. "I would love to see you try."

Danny glanced at him, wrinkled his nose, and stepped farther away, across the short runway. "You are such an idiot."

"Am I now?"

Vlad sent a bolt of pink ectoplasm flying towards the plane. Before he could blink a flash of green whisked by and smashed into it, erupting in a firework of both colors. The plane shuddered, righted itself, and continued unmolested.

Vlad gaped. "That's amazing! What else can you do?"

"Enough."

"Show me."

The plane came down, close to the runway. "I'm not showing you jack."

"I don't want to see Jack. I want to see your powers."

"Very funny."

"Well then…" A flash of pink hurtled toward Danny. He threw up a shield and blocked most of the blast, but the controller in his hands sputtered and smoked. "No!" The plane had been in the process of landing. The controller destroyed, it continued on its way, delicate frame flying at breakneck speed toward the runway. Danny leaped forward, flying now, and caught the thing a moment before it would have crashed. He flicked off the manual control switch and threw up a shield just before another explosion of pink erupted around him.

"Fight, you coward!"

Danny growled and set the plane down carefully before launching himself at Vlad, zapping to ghost in mid-flight. The old man grinned and split himself in four. Danny grimaced and copied the maneuver, his four selves throwing up shields against four more pink blasts. He curved off for a better vantage point. Danny didn't need to be reminded that close combat didn't work well against Vlad.

Then again, nothing worked well against Vlad. Danny hadn't fought him in eons, and now with the practice he'd been doing, they were equals at best. At worst, he'd put Danny in the hospital. And Vlad knew it.

"What's wrong? All talk?"

Danny had to win this fight, and he had to win it definitively, or all the ghosts would return to Amity and the whole nightmare would start up all over again. A cold sweat started on his arms. It wasn't that he was afraid to be brutal; it was that he knew he could be. All he had to do was 'express himself' with all the violence and anger he never could have shown Alicia, or anybody else for that matter. Other kids thought he was weird, and they were right to think so. Danny had never intended to test how 'weird' he had really become. How once or twice a week he woke up sweating, dreaming up a million ways he could have saved them and how somehow, those dreams had affected his skills in the waking world.

"No. Just thinking."

"Ha!" chorused the Vlads, their voices high and off-key. "The strain of it must be killing you."

Four Dannys made a snap decision and sent a quartet of plasma blasts at the Vlads. He—all four of them—blocked every shot effortlessly. "So you can kill your friends, but not your enemies?"

"Shut up!" Four more beams flew through the sky… and burned clear through four pink shields. Vlad yelled, clutching his arm.

"You miserable brat!"

Danny's fists quivered. He was tired of talking. All four of him dove down, dodging blast after blast with needle head turns. Shields blocked plasma but were a poor defense against fists. Danny fought, taking punches and dealing them, dodging and striking and winning.

Vlad wasn't prepared for it. Danny moved too quickly for Vlad to get a good hold on him, and he was too quick with shields to be burned away. But that wasn't the worst of it. Danny had also managed, somehow, to increase the power of his ectoplasm. Every time he landed a punch, it hurt like the devil.

And although he was clearly hurting, the kid didn't let up. Vlad remembered the rumors he'd heard, and suddenly he began to think that this wasn't such a good idea after all. "Danny…" Vlad took a punch to the gut.

"What?"

"You win…"

Danny backed off, moving them both out of each other's grips for the moment. Vlad caught his breath and looked at Danny. He looked away, wishing he'd never come. Danny stared back at Vlad with burned-out eyes and an expression of iron, a totem to despair. "No, Vlad." Danny's hands flashed with plasma. "I don't win."

He flew toward Vlad with the brilliant force of a judgment angel and the two engaged once more, Vlad growing weaker as Danny grew stronger, his fists flying faster, plasma burning deeper until Danny finally drew back his hand and plunged it into Vlad's chest. Vlad roared at the stabbing pain and moved to dislodge him, and Danny discharged a bolt of plasma which struck through Vlad with the force of natural lightning. He opened his mouth to shriek but the blast froze his muscles in a motionless seizure, and after a second or two, Vlad lost consciousness.

Danny dropped his body and retrieved the plane. He inspected it for burns or scratches, damage to the paint, but it had survived the ordeal in perfect condition. Danny gathered it and the ruined controller, wondering when the next bus came. He spared a glance back at the smoking Vlad. Danny walked back to him, standing over his body, watching the weak rise and fall of his chest, and served him a vicious kick in the side. Vlad moaned weakly.

"You stay away from me and my family, and you tell everybody else to do the same."

* * *

A/N: Yes, this story is back. Let me know whatcha think, por favor. 


	4. Upperclassman

Mars

By JadeRabbyt

"Danny was a FREAK! A freak, freak, freak, freak, FREAK! Did I tell you he attacked me once? Attacked me! And I didn't even do anything to him!"  
-Dash Baxter

Dash scored fifty percent on his vocabulary test. Red marks slashed across the paper and through the illegible scribble of his answers, while an ugly '**50**' circled in the same color presided over the bloody mess, floating at the top of his paper like a cloud of doom. The certificate of failure would have darkened anybody's day, and Dash wrinkled his nose at the sight of it. As a foreman, his dad couldn't spell half the days in the week, yet he still made plenty of money. Who cared about spelling and definitions and all that bookwormy geek stuff?

Paulina looked over his shoulder and giggled. "Nice score, Dash." Her long black hair tickled his neck as she leaned closer. "You study hard for that?"

He smirked. "Oh yeah… Real hard." He moved forward and, before she could move, kissed her.

She jerked away and fell back into her seat. "Dash!" Paullina wiped her mouth and pouted as Dash cackled. "You jerk. You know I'm with David now."

"Sorry. Couldn't help myself."

Paullina's teal eyes glared weakly before turning their attention to more amiable company. She had been good in sophomore year, Dash remembered, and a year later she only seemed more beautiful. Too bad she was with that nerd-bag David. He'd asked Paulina about him once, figuring she must have gone crazy or something. It wasn't like her to bother with someone so low on the food chain. But when he'd asked, she'd only shrugged airily and explained that David had a great butt, was an excellent kisser, 'was so cute when he was shy,' etc. etc. All that stupid gay stuff that chicks seemed to love.

Dash had been thinking about giving Dorkster David a knuckle sandwich for some time now. Not only were geeks and nerds running wild—making the whole place that much lamer, but now they were taking all the cute girls.

"Come on class, shut up for a minute so I can earn my bread." Up at the whiteboard, Smithson slapped a dry-erase marker in his hand as he surveyed the class. "This isn't a dating service, it's the junior English class for morons, so get going."

Several football buddies chuckled as Dash dramatically, laboriously, swung himself around to face the board, slumping like a beleaguered gorilla over the worksheet Smithson had just passed out. The other kids chattered and laughed, deaf to their teacher's instruction.

"Next kid who talks gets his butt kicked by the vice principal." At that, the class began to quiet, waiting for Smithson to do whatever stupid thing he'd planned for the day. Dash hunched over the paper, tapping his blunt pencil against the desk, drilling a small hole in its surface as he pretended to concentrate.

The way Dash figured it, everything stemmed from Geek No. 1: Fenton. He'd been the first geek and he'd always been the worst geek. Dash almost felt bad about it, what with the rest of the school so shaken up, but he'd found the dweeb's tragedy hilarious. Imagine it! Fenton, the all-around well adjusted nice-guy, kills his two best buds! Served the little dweeb right, Dash thought. Unfortunately, most people didn't see it that way. Most people found the event horrific and, if they hadn't lent a hand to him, they had at least stopped bothering him. Dash didn't need a weather man to tell him which way the popular wind was blowing, so he'd kept his hands off, settling for occasional threats in the hall or some groundless, casual boasting among his friends.

Dash had sent many an underling to the dentist since then, and freshmen still squealed the best, but none of them squealed as loudly or as emphatically as Fentina. A smile crept up his face as Dash stared sightlessly at the worksheet. It had been what, two or three years now? Nobody really talked about him anymore, with pity or repugnance or anything else, for that matter. If anything, he'd disappeared in the eyes of the school.

Dash really, really hoped Fenton was fair game again, because that little bug-squat was due for a beating.

XXX

Danny thumped down the hall, the sealed letter of his semester grades dangling with pretentious ambivalence from one hand. He had a little trouble believing it. He'd stayed after school for most of freshman year for one reason or another, received countless impromptu tutoring sessions from teachers and others, and he still hadn't managed to get many grades above a B-, which, as everyone but his parents had said back then, was just fine. The letter in his hand reported a grade point average of 3.8. His only B had come from art class. The administration wanted to bump him into AP calculus next year.

"The old Fenton genes finally surfacing, eh Danny?" When Danny reported the news to his parents, Jack clapped him on the back. "I knew you could do it!"

Maddie took the report card to see his success for herself. She beamed at him. "I'm so proud of you, Danny. Great job."

"Thanks." The weird part of it was that he hadn't even tried for any of this. He'd just built his planes and done his homework and suddenly he had A's in trigonometry, physics, and auto shop. One or two other kids had asked him for help on homework, and his teachers kept a quietly happy glimmer in their eyes when he asked or answered questions. The faculty treated him differently, not with greater favor but with greater hope, yet Danny hadn't taken any advice from them or put forth any special effort. His fate changed and his reputation changed, but it seemed to Danny that he was just the same as he'd always been.

In spite of that, news of his success traveled rapidly to those who cared to hear it. One or two casual acquaintances congratulated him, and Alicia ran up to him during lunch the day after he'd talked with his parents. Her blonde hair, bunched in a bun behind her head, had missed a few errant strands that hung about her face like a thin veil. Danny resisted an urge to brush them back. "Congratulations on your grades, Danny." She grinned, clutching a textbook to her stomach.

"Thanks." When he didn't say anything more she nodded awkwardly, her smile less comfortable, and disappeared into the crowded lunchroom. Danny looked after her, watching the wriggling sardine-packed bodies in the lunch line. He definitely preferred the amiable junior year Alicia to the nosy sophomore-freshman year Alicia. She'd become familiar to him, if nothing else, and he'd be a liar if he said that her compliment hadn't improved his day.

Danny took a thoughtful bite of the pizza on his tray. Maybe he didn't feel proud of himself, but he was definitely extremely satisfied. As Danny continued on his lunch and, later, stood up to dump its remains, he never noticed the dark form of a football jock watching him, arms crossed, at a table in the corner.

XXX

At the end of the day, Danny had assignments in history and math and science, all of them due tomorrow. It figured—a boatload of homework on one of the best days he'd had all school year. Danny pulled the necessary books out of his locker and stuffed them in his crowded backpack, feeling smug in spite of the load. He probably could have gotten these grades before if he'd spent his time pulling out books instead of pulling in ghosts with that stupid thermos.

He slammed the swamp-green locker door shut and all the color drained from his face.

"Ha!"

Danny ducked just in time to avoid having his face rearranged by Dash Baxter. He leaped back, throwing his backpack to the ground. "Dash?"

"'S right, Fentina." Dash leaned jauntily against Danny's locker. "Too bad. I really wanted to see if the surgeons could reconstruct your nose."

The gears turned in Danny's head, but slowly. "You haven't bothered me in, I don't know, at least a year. What are you doing?" His former bully had a nasty little smirk and a glitter in his eyes. Danny began edging away.

"What do you think I'm doing?" Dash faked right. Danny took the bait and lunged left, where Dash's waiting foot caught him in the stomach. Although Danny had grown since freshman year, Dash still had the upper hand in physical strength. Danny doubled over gasping as the air fled from him.

Dash yanked Danny up by his collar and struck him on the chin, slamming him against the lockers. It was bad. No teacher would stop this. They had either gone home or were sitting in conferences. School had let out fifteen minutes ago, but several kids lingered in the hallways, watching. Dash pulled back for another punch, and as Danny drew his mind from its daze of ache and astonishment, brushing aside the sharp pains in his jaw and stomach, he became aware of an annoyance… An _acute_ annoyance, that this lumbering jerk would be so stupid as to pick a fight with Danny Phantom. But not Danny Phantom, he reminded himself, Danny Fenton. He had to remember that there was no more Danny Phantom.

The annoyance persisted, a nagging taunt in the back of his head. Danny could pulverize the guy without lifting a finger, yet here was getting smashed by the jerk.

He wouldn't fight if he could help it, so that left running away and escaping. That's what he'd done in freshman year, and it had worked well then. If Danny ran, and Dash caught him and forced a confrontation… well, whatever happened after that would just be Dash's problem, wouldn't it?

Danny broke Dash's grip and jumped out of the way as a fist flew toward him, crashing against the lockers where Danny's chest had been a moment before. Dash growled and shook his pained knuckles as Danny spun free and raced down the hallway.

"Get away from me, Dash!"

Dash roared and beat a path after him. "You think you're soooo clever… Oh, look, I'm Danny Fenton with my nerdy 3.8 GPA! I'll wipe that smile right offa your face…"

They reached the stairwell. Danny crashed through the push-bar doors, swung around the aluminum railing and jumped down the steps, five at a time. He reached the middle landing, breathing heavily, and got halfway down the second flight when he heard a pregnant silence. Behind him, Danny heard the near-silent rippling of clothing and an unnaturally focused breeze.

Danny's breath caught in his throat. This was a stairwell! "DASH! Don't—"

"HAH!"

Dash hit him with a flying tackle from behind, striking Danny like a boulder in mid-step. The two crashed down the stairs to the lower floor's platform; Danny only barely caught himself with his hands as Dash slammed down on top of him. His chin cracked on the tiled floor, and Danny tasted blood in his mouth. Dash grabbed him and whipped him around so that the two were face-to-face on the white linoleum, Dash holding Danny by his jet-black hair, aiming a furious haymaker right between his eyes.

But Dash must have seen something interesting in Danny's expression, because the strike faltered. Before he could get his nerve back, Danny leaped up from the floor and yanked Dash along with him. The would-be-bully had enough time to make a small desperate noise before something started hitting his face, drawing salty blood before pausing. A breath of hope whisked through Dash at the pause but a hand like a vise grabbed his own, twisting the fingers in an unnatural position. Dash screamed as sharp blows struck his stomach, his kneecaps and shins and ribs. Tears started to his eyes; he felt the lightning-shock sensation of his dislocated arm being wrenched one last time, and then the pounding stopped and Dash collapsed on the stairwell platform as footsteps, slow and calm, retreated into an adjoining hallway, leaving him alone.

It hadn't taken longer than ten seconds. The spectators arrived at last, peering over the railing at the aching Dash below. "He must have fallen down the stairs," they said.

XXX

Danny was working on a brake job when Kwan came up to him in auto shop the next day. He waited as Danny drew fluid from a cylinder under the open hood, waiting with his hands in his pockets while Danny bent down to remove the wheels of the jacked-up car. "So… I guess something happened to Dash the other day."

He reached for a nearby tire wrench, applying it gruffly to the rusted lug nuts. "Did it?"

"Yeah." Kwan examined an odd-looking tool Danny had been using. "They say uh, they say that he was chasing you when it happened."

"Did they." An air of coldness lingered in his tone.

"Yeah." Kwan watched as Danny got the wheel off, inspected the antiquitated brakes, pinched the rubber parts as he checked for wear. "Hey, you're pretty good at this stuff." Kwan himself still didn't know the difference between disc brakes and drum brakes. "Your parents auto mechanics?"

"My dad."

"Hm."

Danny frowned at the rubber parts he'd been examining. "Cracked. I'm surprised the parking brake still works."

"Yeah, really." Kwan had no idea what Danny was talking about. "So, did you do it?"

Danny paused in his work, turning to look up at Kwan from his kneeling position on the floor. "Do what?" His ice-blue eyes narrowed, a hint of suspicion lingering there. Danny might have looked intimidating were it not for the doofy shop glasses everybody had to wear, big plastic things that hung over the eyes like mini-windshields.

Kwan grinned. "Bust up Dash. Did you?"

"Maybe. Hey, could you see if Halthorn has any spare dust boots for this junker?"

"No."

"Why not?"

"Because I don't know what they are."

Danny laughed, returning his attention to the car. "At least you're honest."

"Yeah. I'm good at honesty. Not a whole lot else, though."

Danny picked a cloth off the hood of the car and started swiping at rust and dust of the parts around where the wheel had been, lying on his back and scooting under the car for a better angle. "Do you need help with anything? I could give you a hand, and it's too late in the class period to start anything serious on these brakes, anyway."

Kwan shook his head. "Nah. I just wanted to tell you… good job. On Dash, I mean. He's had it coming for a while now, and everybody knows it must have been the fall that really finished him, and that's too bad, but…" Kwan winked and gave him a thumbs-up.

To his surprise, Danny didn't agree. He fooled with the brakes for a second longer before pitching the rag to the ground. Danny stood, wiping greasy hands on his white shop coat. "I don't know about that."

"A lot of us do. You did a good job on him, man."

"I don't like having to fight the gorilla on his terms."

"Even though you kicked his butt at it."

"Yup. I guess I did." Danny smiled with something like regret; it puzzled Kwan. "I have to check on something." Danny walked away before he could press the issue, moving over to the work benches against the wall where Halthorne was showing kids how to install piston rings.

Kwan glanced down at the wheelless car beside him, wondering how Danny knew so well what to do for it. That kid knew everything these days, and he was mellow in the knowing. Despite his former reputation as a geek and as a victim, Danny was—not popular, exactly—but definitely respected by mostly everybody, even if he wasn't best buddies with any of them. He was one of the few 'real' people out there.

Kwan smiled. No wonder Dash had always had it in for the Danny. He was probably jealous.

XXX

AP Calculus was kind of easy, not that Danny ever admitted that to anybody. His class didn't go over many proofs, which had been an Achilles' heel for him since forever, and they mostly worked on memorizing equations for practical applications. Nobody completely understood the formulae, but the teacher made sure that everybody knew how to use them, and that took an effort on her part. Her students hadn't seen any math like this before, and the curling integrals and d-shaped differentials baffled them at first. Danny picked it up naturally after a couple weeks. He enjoyed the problems because they were so easy for him to visualize. Differential equations reminded him of velocity, volume and area of canisters being sliced. By translating equations into pictures, he got by with a B average. Danny didn't sit at the top of the class, but he was also a long way from the bottom.

Mrs. Lows taught the class, which was a mixed blessing. Lows, with her motherly demeanor and sharp eyes, could tell when her students 'just didn't get it' and was adept at diagnosing and curing their ignorance. Going over things step by step, marking numbers and quick diagrams on her overhead projector, she made the class 'get it' while showing Danny the shapes he needed to visualize in order to solve the problems. To his disadvantage, her sense for trouble was just as incisive as her mathematical acumen. Most kids had either forgotten or, like the underclassmen, never learned of Danny misfortune, but Mrs. Lows remembered it every time she looked at him. He didn't appreciate the sympathy, and he dreaded one-on-one conversations with her.

Near the end of his senior year, he was shoved into just that circumstance. She'd as good as tricked him, calling him up to collect his graded test instead of just passing it out. The rest of the students were talking about their own scores, not paying any attention to the dark-haired kid at the teacher's desk except maybe to roll their eyes at yet another of his assumed A's.

"Great job, Danny." Lows had the kind of eyes that twinkled when she smiled. It made Danny uncomfortable.

"Thanks." He looked down to see a bold "91" circled at the top of his paper. He turned to go back to his desk.

"You're doing very well in this class."

Usually she didn't talk for too long. Danny figured he'd humor the person in charge of his grades, even though it hardly mattered in the second semester of his senior year. "I like this class. It's interesting."

Lows chuckled. "Not many kids say that." Danny shrugged. She smiled, leaning her elbows on the cluttered desk. "So, what are you doing next year?"

"I'm not sure. I haven't decided yet." He hated that question.

"Danny, it's April! I was sure you'd know what you were doing. Some of these other kids, well…" She waved them aside, dismissing them with a sigh. "But _you_, I'd think you'd have some idea."

"I've been considering the Air Force, I guess." Not seriously considering it, but he had given it a little thought.

"Oh that's right! You build all those model planes, don't you? I think I saw one of yours the other day. Big red bi-plane?"

"That's one of mine, yes."

"Wow. It must have taken some skill. All those parts… I could never do it. I bet you'd do really well in the Air Force."

"Right." Danny flashed a fake smile and walked back to his desk.

XXX

The stars glimmered like diamonds in the sky overhead. He couldn't see many of them, the bright stage lights glanced off flimsy clouds and hid some in a white mist, but those he could see shone brilliantly.

Danny looked back at the podium, the golden tassel of his graduation hat tickling against his ear at the movement. Principal Ishiyama was still speaking, thundering out the closing remarks, noting how promising they all were, how brightly their futures shone. The floodlights above glimmered off the black gowns of all three hundred graduates, turning them into a rippling sea of what Ishiyama probably considered to be success. Beyond the stage sat the seniors in their gowns and lawn chairs, and beyond them lay a short, naked strip of grass that served as a boundary between the seniors and the bleachers which were packed with proud parents, relatives, friends and neighbors. Danny could see them without much strain if he turned his head just to his shoulder. As Ishiyama wrapped up, the audience behind him held still and silent, a crowd of blinking human statues, shrunken by distance. A hill vaulted up behind the bleachers, and trees stained to ink-black bristles clung to its side as they struck out into the dim fabric of the night, reaching for the so-faint light of the Sun whose glow still hung obstinately to the very top of the hill.

The clapping broke through Danny's reverie. Everybody started cheering; the graduates around him stood up and flung off their hats, diplomas in hand, smiles on their faces. A whirl of chaos. Danny stood up with them, hardly feeling real, taking each step as if the next would carry him off into a space of colors, emotions, and formless undefinables. His friends were missing.

Punch and food, congratulations and hand-shakes and back-slaps and a thousand exchanged words that meant little to him.

"Isn't this great? We're finally out of here!"

"Yes." Danny lifted his punch glass. "Finally!" Then the kid would move on to more garrulous companions and leave Danny alone with his thundering family. Jazz was there, and she had taken a day off from college to make it. She'd tried to talk to him earlier, but Danny had brushed her off. She'd hadn't pressed him, noting that he was far more well adjusted than when she'd left. He still didn't think she was comfortable with him, but Jazz had pronounced her brother a victorious trooper anyway.

Later that evening, when people began to wander off to go home or party or whatever it was they did, Danny was about ready to follow his parents to the car when he was accosted by somebody who knew he wasn't a victorious trooper in the slightest.

"The AIR FORCE? You're going to the AIR FORCE?"

Danny winced, motioning to Alicia to lower her voice. "Come on, just about everybody knew that before they announced it tonight."

"_I_ didn't." Danny was startled to see that she was on the verge of tears.

"What's wrong?" He hated to see her so upset. Alicia was a great girl, and she'd made herself beautiful for graduation night, fixing her hair and adding makeup, her features refined and sculpted.

Her golden eyes drilled into him. "You're wrong. You shouldn't do that."

"Why not?"

"Because that's not who you are!" Alicia looked desperately up at him. "The _Air Force_… It's just people bossing you around all day!"

Danny had spent most of the last couple months avoiding this exact conversation with dozens of other people, but here it was anyway. "Look, don't make this any harder than it already is."

"Danny." Alicia touched his hand, her features softening at the sight of his discomfort. "What… Why…?"

"I don't know." He cast another look at the sky. If you wanted to know what a star held, all you needed was a pair of eyes and a ship with a good enough engine. "Because it's easy, that's why."

Alicia shook her head. "That reason sucks."

"It does." Danny smiled. Reaching over, he brushed a speck of dust off her black graduation gown, unzipped to show the sapphire satin dress she wore beneath. "But it works. I like planes."

She slapped his hand away, meeting his eyes critically. "Me too. But I'm not joining the army."

"Nope. You're going to college."

"Just like all the _sane_ students." Danny chuckled, but he knew Alicia was only half joking. "What are you going to do. You're going to go kill people, that's what you're going to do." Danny's expression darkened, but Alicia caught herself before he could protest. "No, I know, that was out of line."

He sighed and glanced back at his car. "Look, it's been a great year, but I have to go now."

"Wait." Alicia caught his arm. Danny looked at her, wondering what she wanted, why she'd called him over in the first place. He saw her eyes were sad, mouth tight, not angry, but disappointed?

"I'll miss you," she said.

For a reason he couldn't fathom, Danny felt cold. His knees weakened under him. "I…" He stopped. Not only were his knees unreliable, but suddenly he had no breath to speak with. Danny met Alicia's eyes—her breath had gone as well. He stepped closer, into the universe of feeling, and kissed her. The kiss came and passed in an instant, but time stopped in that instant. He pulled away and held her hands, his own ice cold in her hot touch. He felt things he couldn't afford to understand or acknowledge.

"Thank you," he tried. "For… being there."

Alicia smiled. A tear leaked out her eye, down her cheek. Danny drew it off, his finger leaving the ghost of a touch on her cheek, holding her hand for a second longer. He looked back only once as he walked away, just before he stepped into his family's waiting car. Alicia was still standing there, her arms hanging powerlessly by her sides.

* * *

A/N: Well, the only thing I can say to this atrociously long update time is that good things come to those who wait. At least, I hope this was a good thing. Let me know. I've been goofing with the style again, and feedback is a critical part of the JadeR update engine. Target date for next chapter: one week. 


	5. Cadet

A/N: Thanks to all of you who reviewed last time! It is very muchly appreciated. :) Before we get this party started, I've got a couple things to say. The **first** is about the time factor. I can't update as fast as I would like AND keep the quality I insist on, so I'm going to do my best and take my time. Screw deadlines. The **second** thing is about Danny's ROTC program. I have never been in the ROTC, nor have I conversed with anyone who has. I did, however, do a butt load of research for this, so if I get a few details wrong, it's not out of disrespect or careless ignorance. **LASTLY** (it's in bold caps because you MUST read this part), the rating will be changed to M on 8/22, to give those who have been tracking this on the K-T page a chance to know what's going on. This chapter covers Danny's college experience, and he runs into some very college-y things. So be ready for that.

Mars

By JadeRabbyt

"I saw a lot of guys like him come through. They're timid, but then they find their space and settle in like they were made for the job. Fenton worked harder than many others, but he never struck me as dangerous."  
--Corporal Ross Ulrich

"Welcome, everyone, to the Air Force Reserve Officers' Training Corps. My name is Jorgen Newman, head of the ROTC program here at Grant University, and I'd like to congratulate you all on your acceptance to this program. Here you can look forward to a full four years in college, during which you'll not only earn a degree, but also gain all the knowledge and training you need to go on to become an officer in the Air Force. We'll give you an excellent education, and the ROTC will teach you invaluable skills in leadership and responsibility. Together, these two things are priceless in the private sector, but you'll already have a job waiting for you by the time you graduate, and that job will be with the most technologically advanced military complex in the world.

"But you'll get more than a good job during your time here. Each of you is an individual, and we respect that here. Individuals have unique talents and weaknesses, but here there is room for everybody. You may choose to serve in one of a hundred of different way, ranging from chaplain to pilot to civil engineer, all depending on your unique talents and skills. Whatever your specialty, rest assured that we will find it out and hone it, teaching you exactly how to use your talent in the most productive ways possible. As an officer you will be taught to take and give orders effectively and efficiently, and such a thing requires confidence and courage. You'll earn that here, and it will stick with you for the rest of your life.

"I can truthfully say that nobody here has joined for purely selfish reasons. I don't care if you think you're 'only here because of the scholarship' or not. You are all here because you have made a choice to serve your country, and that requires courage and it requires altruism. No matter why you made that choice, the fact is there that you've made it, and your country thanks you."

XXX

The final words met the thundering, applauding, cheering approval of the whole audience in that darkened auditorium. Parents and students smiled at each other and nodded proudly and knowingly. Some of those present were in the military, others had long since retired, but the entering freshmen had done neither. They were there for more reasons than could be counted, each having followed a different road. Some kids didn't have the money to pay their own way, so they had decided to let the ROTC pay it for them. Others followed their parents, several generations having served in the military before them, and these kids were the most confident, feeling the weight of tradition on their backs and under their feet, both a solid foothold and a responsibility to be fulfilled.

A third class of students had arrived through desperation. Some hadn't had the grades to make it into a normal college, so they had shambled into the ROTC. Others simply hadn't known what else to do. They were normal and friendly, most of the time, but in one sense or another, they wandered. From the vantage point of the podium, where Jorgen Newman still stood smiling out at the audience, it would have been impossible to say which group was which. Everybody clapped, and nobody dared to express any doubts amid so much approval, but speckled throughout the crowd were those who felt something hardening in their stomach.

Danny didn't know what he was doing. That was all there was to it. He'd gotten a brochure in the mail; that's how he'd first learned about the 'AF ROTC', and it had looked pretty good. He already had some experience in defense, and with people telling him what to do, it would be impossible for him to mess things up too badly. Besides, he figured that if he flew a plane, he'd never even have to face his enemy. In the brochure, this had all sounded easy, but this man had said things that the brochure hadn't bothered to include. Newman spoke like this was real, something that could and would get personal. Danny didn't doubt himself, because the only way to go was forward. He had chosen this, and he was going to do it to the best of his ability. Either something unfortunate would happen, or it wouldn't.

XXX

Set a few miles from the only highway in the area, Grant University was nobody's idea of trial or tribulation, and unlike many other colleges, it never had been. Its grand brick buildings had risen in the late nineteen fifties, and a small town had sprouted like weeds all around it, thriving off its student body. Helmut City was a college town. A small business district became a downtown shopping area of restaurants, used book shops, and drugstores, most staffed by enrolled students. A five-screen theater did some business next to a bowling alley, but the landscape was the main appeal.

The whole town crouched in the middle of an expansive forest, forming no more than a tiny dot on any map. If not for the university, nobody but the truckers would have paid any mind. It snowed in the winter and soared to the nineties in the summer, and the trees turned gold in autumn. The university sat on a hill, allowing the students and excellent view of the landscape as it changed color and texture over the seasons. Below the hill, the trees and distant plains of farmland spread out before them like an immense skirt. It made it easy to feel isolated.

Resources of moderate quality met teachers who weren't always the best. The grounds were well cared-for, and clubs abounded for hiking and trail-blazing the dense forest around the town. The school prided itself on the sports programs and the ROTC, catering to the lower middle class and its offspring. Danny hadn't visited before enrolling, but he'd thought it seemed like his kind of place. It shouldn't be too difficult to handle, if nothing else.

XXX

Danny dropped his bags on the floor and discovered that all the fussing he'd done with his parents had been absolutely pointless: his roommate hadn't arrived yet, so there was officially nobody to hide them from. As one of the earliest people to check in, his house had received only a quarter of its scheduled arrivals. The emptiness worried him and relieved him. Being alone in such a place made him edgy, but at least he could get himself oriented without distraction.

The room had two beds on either side of a single desk, with another desk situated against the wall. Two windows peered over both beds, and two closets stood in corners beside the door. Danny took the bed on the right and let his suitcase thump on top of it, unzipping the thing and starting to unpack his stuff. Every once in a while, bare feet pattered past his open door. He'd wanted to close it, but all the other doors were open and it would have drawn attention. It might have given his roommate the wrong impression, too. Then there came the trouble of whether he should stay and unpack or go out and meet the pattering feet. Danny frowned to himself and glanced at his boxes and cases of things, piled on the floor. He could deal with it later. He walked to the door and looked out.

Almost immediately, a bright, hazel-eyed face filled his vision. "Hello!"

Danny took a step back. "Hi."

"You must be a freshman. You smell like freshman." The face—a girl with eyes too big and a nose too small—breathed deeply. "Yup. Freshman."

Danny felt himself blushing. "What?"

She broke into a smile and touched his arm. "Come on. I'm kidding. You actually smell pretty good. Most people have to drive here, and some of them, for the distance they've come, really should have _flown_, and it just gets…" She rolled her eyes and waved a hand before her nose. "Well, I'm sure you know how people smell when they stay in a car for too long."

It was difficult for Danny to find an answer for that. "So this is a… coed dorm?"

She clucked her tongue. "My my. You really _are_ a freshman." She paused a moment, her eyes wandering over his features, scanning his face and stature with academic concentration. Danny opened his mouth to speak but decided against it. Clearly she was otherwise occupied. Instead, he stuck his hands in his pockets and leaned back awkwardly against the doorpost. After a time that seemed longer than it was, the girl cocked her head. "You look odd."

"What?" Maybe he should have kept unpacking.

"I don't mean, like, weird odd. I mean kind of cool odd. Some people have that look about them. A lot of the Jews have it. You're not Jewish, but you have it." When he didn't say anything, she continued. "I'm not, like, racist or anything against the Jews. They're just… I don't know. Maybe it's the black hair and blue eyes that are confusing me. What nationality is that, Alaskan?"

"I don't think so."

"Christine!" Down the hall, another girl stuck her head out a doorway. "Don't tease the freshies! They'll know how weird you are soon enough." To Danny, she shook her head. "Don't worry about her. She's an art major."

Danny nodded, as if this explained everything. "Ah."

Christine giggled. "I know. I'm sorry. I'm so bad." She waved goodbye and trotted back to her own room, where her friend waited inside. Danny stood there wondering whether he'd missed something or gained something from that. He shrugged, and after a last glance at the giggling dorm room down the hall, he started for the lounge, one of four stationed at each corner of the building. Two people were already there, both males—thankfully. One of them was reading a paper, the other was messing with some school documents. Both were reclining on the gray couch, their feet kicked up on the hardwood lounge table.

"…Can't believe this. They got rid of Kelly."

"Kelly? The geology guy?"

"Yup. He didn't cut the mustard, or something."

"I heard he was falling asleep in class."

Danny raised a friendly hand. "Hi."

The two looked up at him. The one with the paper sat on the couch, his hair trimmed in a buzz-cut. The other looked like he'd been born with a bowl cut. "Hey. Freshman?"

Danny laughed. "Is it really that obvious?"

"Yes. Don't worry about it. Butterflies are worms first."

"Larva," corrected Buzz-cut.

Bowl-cut shrugged. "Whatever."

"My name's Danny. Danny Fenton."

"Ross Ulrich," said Buzz-cut, standing from the couch to shake hands.

The other boy merely nodded. "Ben Faldman."

Both were juniors, and Danny took advantage of that, asking about the teachers and the campus and if either of them knew anything about the ROTC program. They raised their eyes at that. "You're in the ROTC? Me too." Ross grinned. "I'll be seeing you around."

"Right." Danny started to feel better. Ross seemed like an okay guy, not a psychopath or a nutcase or anything. "How is it? Is it difficult, or…?"

He hadn't meant to put the question so timidly, but Ross shook his head and answered it anyway. "It ain't easy, but it's not impossible at all. Can you work?"

Danny nodded.

"Then you'll do fine."

He also learned that Kelly had been a kind but irresponsible geology teacher, who had just been dismissed, and that Halberd and Martinez were the best teachers to get for English. "Half the class knows more than they do," added Ben. "If you want an easy time, go for them." For history, you wanted Gerry because he could teach you a lot without assigning tons of work, which was important for two reasons. The first was, naturally, that unnecessary work is stupid, and the second was that the ROTC took its history seriously. "If you can show off your regular history knowledge in the Air Force history class, you're on easy street." Ross rustled his paper shut. "There's a guy in my division who makes the rest of us look like idiots. It's a good thing if you can be that guy."

XXX

People flowed by him in a strange river of anonymity, and Danny stood in the center of the hallway squinting between his map and his schedule, wondering where on earth his classroom was. He didn't even know if he was in the right building, and class started in… He checked his watch. Four minutes. Four _minutes_. It might take him that long just to get out of _this_ building.

"Need some help?"

He glanced up from his map. A teacher stood at an open door, waiting as his own students hurried in. Small glasses rimmed his eyes, and his blue coat rustled as kids whisked past it. Danny thought he could see some kind of lab equipment on the tables inside his classroom.

"Can you tell me where Tailman Building is?" He thought this one was Tailman Hall, but there was also Tailman Auditorium, Tailman Laboratory, and Tailman Cafeteria. Danny's schedule said only 'Tailman Building.'

"That's just across from here, other side of the lawn. What room are you?"

"209."

"That's economics." The teacher rubbed his chin, looking past Danny. "Should be toward the back, second floor."

Danny stuffed the papers in his pocket. "Thanks." Running as fast as he could manage, bumping into everybody and probably making enemies of half the campus, he made it to the room just as the second-hand needle hit twelve. The lecture hall seated around two hundred, and only half of them were filled. The students already present looked with sardonic amusement at the panting kid in the doorway. After a moment, Danny saw why.

The teacher wasn't there yet.

At least he couldn't possibly look any dumber than he felt. Trying not to draw any more attention to himself, he climbed up the steps, into the upper tiers, sitting down in a less crowded area. He reached in his backpack for some paper and a binder and slapped both on the desk. Another boy, several seats away from him, watched Danny from the corner of his eye.

Danny noticed and glared at him.

The other shrugged and looked down. He sat slouched at the desk, doodling nonsense on a scrap of legal paper. "Couldn't find the room?"

"Couldn't find the building."

The kid slouched to his side, speaking with a grin from the corner of his mouth. "There's a movement I'm starting. Our goal will be to assassinate Tailman, in order to prevent him from donating any more stuff." He smirked at Danny. "Are you with me?"

"More or less." Danny smiled at last, looking towards the doorway. "Are the teachers usually this late?"

The kid nodded slowly. His brown eyes glinted. "Only if there's cookies in the break room. Which there usually are."

"Great."

True to prophesy, a decidedly paunchy teacher scurried into class some minutes later. He glanced in disgust at his garrulous charges who chuckled under their hands at him. No matter. He'd learn them some good soon enough. He threw some books on the desk and whipped out a piece of chalk. "Y'all shut up now!"

Thus began Danny's first college class.

XXX

The end of the day left him with books, notes, and homework. All things considered, Danny didn't think it had been that bad at all. This was more like high school than he'd expected, and he'd started to think that the orientation speech had just been another gimmick, more advertising that didn't mean much after all. If the ROTC classes followed this pattern, he was on easy street.

Back at the dorm, late in the afternoon, Danny set down his backpack and unloaded what he needed. There was a problem set for Algebra, due in a week. He had to pick up a book for English class, due in three days. History meant studying notes, which could probably be put off indefinitely. Danny hadn't been too impressed with his history teacher.

He wandered out into the hallways, looking for somebody, preferably another freshman. People were still getting in from their classes, and many of them had to stay late for labs, sports, clubs, or any number of other things. He felt strange walking around in the quiet dorm, but it wasn't uncomfortable. He was used to it, after all, and actually preferred it most of the time. Danny arrived at the lounge and plunked down on the couch, spreading his arms across the back. Things were different here, in a good way. A small cloud of Air Force dread hung over his head, but other than that, he had more space, less assumptions, and greater freedom. People didn't know him, and he didn't know them. He wondered if it was really that easy.

Of course it wasn't. He still had to be careful. Danny sighed and curled forward, rubbing his eyes with the palms of his hands.

He heard talking in the hallway and composed himself quickly. When Ross came in, Danny was just reaching for the funny pages amid the stack of papers on the footrest-table. "Hey," he said.

Ross took one of the easy chairs at a corner to the couch, his own paper tucked under one arm. "Hi. What do you think?" He kicked his feet up on the table.

"About the classes?"

"Sure."

_I think they're a joke_. "I think they're… alright. I haven't been to all of them yet, but this looks place looks okay."

Ross chuckled. "You mean easy."

"More or less." They were joking, but he didn't like Ross' smile. Too many of his teeth were showing. "What is it? Is there something horrible I haven't discovered yet?" Danny was thinking of the AF class.

"No. You're just new." Ross spread open his paper. "Don't worry about it."

XXX

The next day, Danny had to run back to the dorm and change, since the AF ROTC classes required uniforms for attendance. He pulled on the stiff camouflage pants and buttoned up the jacket, yanked on the slick black boots and donned the cap. The stuff hadn't been washed yet; it was still new from the wrapping. Danny felt like he was wearing a tarp. He made the mistake of glancing at himself in the mirror and winced.

It was like he'd donned another personality. The jacket hung loose around his arm, bunching at the cuffs near his wrists, and the pants clustered near the tops of his boots. He looked just like every other military guy he'd ever seen, in movies or in life. Height and weight were the only distinguishing features: some were bigger than others, but all looked equally solemn and deadly. The suit hid his body and the cap hid his face, its bill throwing a small shadow across his eyes. Danny turned it backwards, and that was better, but it still gave him the creeps.

He flexed his arms, holding them out straight from his body. The green and mottled white of the uniform wrinkled at the shoulders, the fabric at his sides drawing out from him. Danny dropped his arms, and the wrinkles smoothed. It was strange, but not intolerable. It would have been naïve for him to think this would be easy, anyway. Danny grabbed his backpack and stepped out, fixing his cap as he left the room.

XXX

He made it easily to the building and found his room. He ignored the kids staring at his uniform along the way; they could stare at others. There were over five hundred ROTC students at Grant, so he was by no means an oddity. Danny sat down in the middle of roughly forty others and waited, quietly like the rest of them, for class to start.

The instructor arrived on time. He stood straighter, spoke louder, and commanded more attention than any of his other teachers. He also knew much more about what he was teaching and, presumably, more about how to teach it. He started with ten minutes of introductory business, including his qualifications—Vietnam vet—and the goal of the course—to give students a good idea of the Air Force's background—then he drove right into the material, drawing a line down the chalkboard and beginning to illustrate differences in strategy, revolutions in technology, and the improvements of military tactics over time.

This, he said, was just a general introduction. Analysis and detail would come later in the semester. Danny and the rest of the students were too busy taking notes to worry about anything except the squeaking of the chalk and the instruction of the teacher as both revealed strings of potential testing material.

"Everybody likes to scare the freshman," Ross would tell him later. "Teachers slow down after the first week." Danny almost hoped they didn't, because he could more than keep up, and the class fascinated him more than he could explain.

XXX

The ROTC consisted of three hours of instruction time per week: two in a classroom, and one in what was called leadership lab. The classes taught history, regulations, and strategy, while the lab involved drills. For the freshmen, drills meant marching, but all the older students claimed they enjoyed leadership laboratory the most. For them, it meant crawling on ropes across pools, performing mock field operations, and generally having far more fun than the freshmen. Danny looked forward to that stuff, but in the meantime, he did what they told him, and he tried to do it well.

They kept him on his toes in the first semester. Danny balanced school and play, and he erred on the side of caution, doing his best to avoid unpleasant social relations altogether. The self-titled Raymond the Roommate, a square-jawed boy with an affinity for leather jackets, was an irritation who found Danny a little weird, and the two of them, by tacit agreement, stayed out of each other's way. His only other people problem wasn't so easy to resolve. Danny's parents would call him every two weeks or so, and Danny would have to talk to them. Yes, he was doing well. No, he didn't need anything. He was glad to hear that Jazz had gotten another award. It was nice for him to hear that they were both doing well.

It shouldn't have been a chore, but it was. Talking to his parents always made Danny feel like he'd been hit in the head with a brick. After the second time they called, Raymond bobbed in and asked if he wanted to play basketball.

"No." Danny was lying atop his bed, listening to music through headphones.

"You look pathetic. Get your butt out here and play basketball."

"Get lost." Ray stuck out his lip and ducked out of the room. A few petulant, grumbling moments later, Danny hauled himself up and followed him.

The game was going on right next to the dorm's main entrance, having spurned the comfortable facilities of the gym. They'd tacked laundry baskets to long, sturdy wooden boards and anchored them in the flower planters at opposite ends of small courtyard. The boys and a couple girls rushed back and forth across the cement as they chased after the ball, the only conventional piece of equipment on the 'court.'

"Can I play?" Danny called.

Ray paused the game. The others stood up straight, taking a moment to breathe. "I don't know. We already have even teams."

"Then I'll go back inside. This game is already so conventional that I'd hate to have to disturb its perfect symmetry."

"Touché." Ray grinned. "You're on team Airport Security Fascists."

Danny took his place on the opposite end of the court, where others introduced themselves and welcomed him. "Whose team is Ray on?"

"The other team?" A girl smiled. "They're the Filthy Liberals."

The game started, and Danny dove after the ball with the rest of them, helping to pass and score and dig the ball out of the laundry basket after a successful shot. His headache faded as he worked with the others, feeling the adrenaline in his veins and the release in his muscles. Chasing a ball handler up the court, rushing forward to get open for a pass, he couldn't deny that it felt a little like flying. From then on, Danny made a point to play basketball regularly.

XXX

"He's so sessy." Laura took a bite of her sandwich and chewed thoughtfully, leaning out the window of her dorm room. "Don't you think he's sessy?"

Christine was bent over a sketch pad at her desk, and she didn't answer immediately. She had been watching Danny too, ever since the day he'd arrived when she'd ambushed him in the hallway, but she hadn't said anything more than 'hello' to him since then. "Yup. He sure is."

Laura was watching the basketball game below. Danny, along with several other decently cute guys, had been playing for quite a while. She liked to watch them compete. The scene had a healthy, joyous look to it: nine or ten college kids out for a fresh air and a good time with one another. "I'm thinking of asking him out."

Christine bit her lip, not looking up from her work. "I don't know why you'd bother. He doesn't go to any of your parties."

"He might if I asked him." Laura followed the object of her affection down the court. His limbs moved with sincere urgency, and his crazy black hair whipped along with the wind. He really was cute, and such a nice guy, too.

"I don't think he's much of a party person," Christine murmured.

Laura frowned. "Are you sure?"

"Yup."

"You're positive."

"Absolutely."

Laura sighed and crossed her arms on the windowsill. She knew as well as anybody that Christine knew her business in these things. As strange as Christine acted, she could scent emotions like a beagle scented rabbits. She was virtually useless in any kind of collaborative assignment or business project, but she could read people like books. "Too bad."

"It is." A brisk, scratching noise signaled the onset of her eraser. "I'd stay away from him if I were you."

Laura came away from the window and sat on her bed, watching now her roommate. "Why?"

Christine bit her lip. Her fingers pinched a black pencil, carefully following a curve. "He has issues. He isn't… He isn't built right. He's beautiful, but he isn't built right."

"What does that mean?"

Christine shook her head. "I don't know."

XXX

With the course load being what it was, and Raymond being the party-animal jock that he was, Danny would generally run out of things to do around seven o'clock at night. The first time it happened he sat on his bed and wondered what he was expected to be doing without his planes to work on or a TV to watch any more. Danny was ambivalent about television, but he missed building his planes, the rich social life of college notwithstanding. There was no room for them in the dorm, and if there had been, he wouldn't have trusted his peers around the delicate balsa constructions.

In his next ROTC class, Danny asked if he should be doing anything extra if he wanted to be a pilot.

The instructor shuffled a stack of papers as the other students filed out. "Doing well in the classes you've got now would be a start."

"I am. But are there any other classes or manuals that would be good?"

"Engineering. Any class in aeronautics, mathematics, or engineering would be excellent." The instructor also gave him the titles of several good books and manuals that might be helpful. Danny could tell that the teacher didn't seriously expect him to look them up, but he knew he'd made some kind of impression.

Danny checked the schedule of classes. Many different engineering classes were available, and he scribbled down the names of several promising ones. He did the same for the math and aeronautics classes, then went to the library and searched for the books. Only two of the five recommended were available for checkout, so he got those two and flipped through the others. Diagrams, schematics, and blurbs of text filled the pages. He ran his finger along the struts and wingspans, building the bare frame in his mind and trying to see it flying. The sleek ships were built to glide invisibly through the air, performing thousands of missions and complex maneuvers that his constructions could only mock.

Leaving the library with the two books under his arm, Danny felt stronger. The air smelled fresher and his vision seemed sharper, the colors of the world had brightened. He finally knew something for certain, now. He was going to be a pilot.

XXX

"Keep in mind all these measures are purely defensive…"

"…and in this battle you can see how the hesitance of the commander cost us thousands of lives…"

"…many revolutions in battle techniques…"

"Our soldiers are our most important asset."

"…can't be afraid to make decisions."

"…_always_ obey your commanding officer…"

"You are responsible for your actions."

The teachers took him seriously. He worked hard and fought with no one, and while they knew he didn't have many friends, they recognized him as something special and treated him as such. They gave him more books and references, and once they arranged for him and several others to watch real pilots at their drills. Privately, they agreed that he had room for improvement. He was too timid, for one thing. He sat in back and didn't talk much, but when he did speak, it was worth listening. The matter came up at one of the department meetings—somebody mentioning their favorite student, who, as it happened, was the favorite of others as well. Such kids came along every once in a while, and when it happened, they tried to give them that extra push. They agreed to give this one more responsibility and to encourage him in leading the group projects.

The plan worked. The other students noticed, but they didn't complain. More responsibility meant a greater opportunity to screw up, and they still got plenty of leadership assignments. Nobody teased him, and he bore the load with grace. Rather than cracking, he actually solidified under pressure, and the more they gave him the better he became. The effect was visual. His brain seemed built for it. Over the months of his freshman year and on into his sophomore and junior years, his prowess became remarkable in its intensity. He shone brightest in his mechanics classes, where fellow students termed him a genius, but he excelled in strategic maneuvers as well, precisely identifying options and risks.

XXX

"So I hear you're supposed to be some kind of protégé or something." Ray slouched in a desk chair and tossed a rubber bouncy-ball at the ceiling, catching it and throwing it up again. "That right?"

It wasn't right—not exactly. Danny used the same technique as he'd used in high school calculus to solve strategy puzzles and engineering dilemmas. If he could find a comfortable geometric visualization to represent the concrete problem, he could simplify the matter enormously by dealing with only that shape, then translating the changes he'd made to the shape into a new form, the solution, of the puzzle. Danny was of the opinion that if others spent the time to find a similarly efficient way to manipulate problems, then they could be every bit the genius that he himself was.

"Basically." Danny looked up from his book, unwilling to explain the process in full to his former roommate. Ross had long since graduated, and Danny was assigned a new roommate every year, but Ray continued to drop in on him from time to time, though why he did it was a mystery to Danny. The guy must have a streak of sadistic, misguided altruism to keep after him like this. Ray didn't come by often, but when he did, resistance was futile.

The rubber ball pulsed against the ceiling. "When was the last time you went to the movies?"

Danny shrugged, following the toy with his eyes.

"Party?" Raymond tried.

"I don't do that stuff."

He clucked his tongue and set the ball aside. "You poor fool. You're a junior and you've never been to a party. Were you dropped as a child, or what?"

"Hey, just because you like that stuff doesn't mean I do."

"Nah. You just like to work like a stinkin' Pentium VI."

Danny glared at the space over Ray's shoulder. "So what's today's pitch?"

"Okay." Raymond leaned forward urgently, resting his elbows on his knees. "There's this party over at Green House. It's a couple blocks off campus, but it's a pretty good crowd that goes there." He bounced his ball off the floor, punctuating the point. "Even a computer like you could have some fun."

Danny had never considered himself a computer, and he didn't particularly appreciate it when other people did. "I think I'll leave the partying to you monkeys. Computers have work to do."

"Fine." Raymond returned to his bouncing, and Danny went back to his book. He was deeply engrossed in a diagram of an old fighter when the book slipped out from under his fingers.

"Hey!"

"What's this?" Raymond held the book in front of his nose, dodging away as Danny leaped up from his chair. "Blueprints? You're going to forsake a _party_ for _blueprints_?"

"Give that back, Ray." Danny made a grab for it, but the thief slipped away easily. He wished Ray would just give the dumb thing back and leave him alone. "You don't even like me! Why on earth would you want me at a party with you?"

A bed came between them, which took the book out of Danny's easy reach. Ray closed it and held it to his chest, staring at Danny. "Because you're square. You're like a floppy disk—the old floppy disks that were the size of a small dinner plate. You sit in this room and study your butt off and suck up to teachers, and then you study more stuff that they don't even test you on. For fun. That's just twisted." Ray smirked. "One of these days you're going to go postal and kill us all unless I take you out for some real fun."

Danny held out his hand. "Give me the book. I promise not to go postal." It was a promise he knew he could keep. These last few years, Danny had been feeling better than he could ever remember feeling.

But Ray didn't know that, and he'd been bothering Danny about his habits for some time. "Nuh-uh. I'm not giving this geek fuel back until you 'promise' to come to this party at Green House with me."

"Fine." Ray handed him the book. "Thank you."

XXX

Danny could feel the vibration of the Green House's bass speakers through the armrest on the car door. A deaf person could have followed the melody. Raymond made one pass by the house, a cream colored two-story domicile with a wide front lawn and a brick path leading from sidewalk to front door. Propped wide open for the festive event, yellow light spilled through the door onto the lawn, illuminating five or six laughing, chatting forms. Ray hung his head out the window and hollered his greetings to the kids scattered about the place. Danny could clearly see that several of them held dark brown bottles.

"I don't know about this."

"You don't know anything about anything." Ray looked askance at him. "You'll like it."

"Don't the neighbors object to the music?"

Ray laughed. "The neighbors are all classmates. They're either at the party here or at the party down the block. This isn't exactly the study district."

They had to go several blocks to find a parking spot spot. Once he did, Ray grinned like a chimpanzee as he pulled the key from the ignition and jumped from the car. Danny followed him up the sidewalk, looking nervously into the night sky. Few lights shone in the windows of the houses around him, and Ray's chatter did nothing to relieve his anxiety.

"They'll be playing a movie, if nothing else, and there's tons of girls there."

"'Kay."

"You'll like it. They have a keg, if you want some of that."

"Not going to happen."

Ray turned and looked at him. "Is your picture next to 'anal' in the dictionary? It's a party; not a funeral." He slapped Danny's back. "Lighten up."

It didn't feel as much like a funeral as a walk down the green mile. Danny dragged his feet until Ray got behind him, giving him a helpful little shove whenever he felt Danny was going too slowly. It was like trying to force together matching poles of a magnet. The party and the geek repelled each other.

"So you can command kids in your Air Force and impress the crap out of your teachers, but you have a problem with _parties_?"

"This… is a completely different area."

Ray chuckled. "You can say that again."

The music roared up on them as they got closer to the house. Danny looked about him, at the near-black lawn and the shining windows of the house before him, trying to take in everything at once. They walked up the brick path, and Danny idled as Ray greeted several of his friends on the lawn. He peered inside the house, looking at all the kids dressed in jeans and t-shirts, the girls in halter or tank tops, clothes made to exhibit their assets rather than hide them. More people inside carried beer bottles, holding them at angles fated for an accidental spill. Others held their beer in clear plastic cups, a half-inch of foam covering the liquid below. Some, he was happy to see, sipped at red punch-like stuff or some clear water-looking fluid. Danny bit his lip, angling for a better look. Ray noticed him and rolled his eyes to his friends, their group sharing a private laugh at the party-virgin's caution.

Ray shoved his shoulder. "Go on. You can do it."

"Shut up, Ray." Danny tried for the door, attempting an easy saunter which came off as the walk of a constipated giraffe. Ray pointed and his mouth gaped in a smile, having one last laugh before attending to his own buddies.

Inside it was warm and sour-smelling, and the heavy drums of the rock music beat on his ears. It wasn't as loud as he'd thought it would be, but it was more than enough to put him on his toes. Danny fidgeted with the lint in his pants pockets, heading for what looked like the kitchen when his rigid stance drew stares. He bumped past several others on his way, boys with their jet-black or golden-brown hair moussed in waves, girls with straight blonde hair and pretty noses whose v-neck tops revealed more than was necessary. Danny thought he must stick out like a sore thumb in this place. His hair was the same chaotic style it had always been, but his clothes looked okay, a plain white t-shirt under an unbuttoned blue-checked collared shirt, and jeans. As far as posture went, with his hands in his pockets and his shoulders hunched forward, Danny knew he must look like he was bracing for impact. Which, in a way, he was. Nevertheless, he tried to relax. Nobody would talk to him if he kept the demeanor of a scared bum.

In the kitchen, the sound echoed horribly. Tiles did nothing to dull the sounds of laughing, talking, and thudding music. A metal keg sat on the counter, and the kids drank liberally from it, filling plastic cups from its spout. Several cases of bottles sat in the corner, one of them already emptied and tossed aside. Danny's fingers itched to try the stuff, but it was more fear than inhibition which kept him back. He looked for the punch instead, but it wasn't in the kitchen. Probably in the dining room, or something. Having decided that the kitchen was not the place to be, Danny started out for a living room or a wide hallway, someplace where he could either find something suitable to drink or pull somebody aside and start up a decent conversation. If he was here, he might as well make the best of it.

It was a good plan, but as soon as he turned to leave the kitchen a hand grabbed his arm from behind.

"Hey buddy." A kid with a goatee smiled toothily at him. "You want some?"

"Uh…"

But the guy was already filling a cup for Danny. "Here." He held it out, and Danny almost grabbed it, but a girl slapped the cup-offering hand away.

"You don't want that." The girl's airy blonde hair filtered by her cheeks and neck as she shook her head. "Not good for you." Her short frame stood between himself and the other boy. Danny breathed a sigh of relief. He tried not to make it too obvious.

"I don't see why he can't make up his own mind," protested the booze-pusher. "He's all grown-up."

Another girl sidled up to the first, this one taller, with brown hair and a heavier frame. "You heard her. Shove off." The kid shrugged and ambled down the hall. Both girls scowled after him. "Jerk. Sorry about that." The brown-haired one smiled at him. Together, the two girls acted like best friends, or a team. Teams were good, especially if they were acknowledging him. "Most of the people here are nice, but some of them are just a little out there."

"Geoff isn't so bad," protested the blonde. Danny liked the color of her hair, a shining white kind of blonde that might have strained light. She was short compared to the brunette, and nearly everybody else. Her blue eyes seemed too big, and her nose too small. Danny recognized her as the girl who'd accosted him in the hallway on his first day at college. "Geoff is decent. He just likes to party."

"Yeah, I _know_, but…" The brunette looked anxiously between Danny and her friend.

"Oh! Right. Introductions." She cleared her throat. "Danny Fenton, this is Laura Salinger. And I'm Christine."

"We saw you come in and we thought we'd say hi," explained the brunette. Laura.

"You're the girls who used to be in the dorm down the hall." Danny smiled, happy to be on some firm ground. "I remember you; you called me weird."

"I called you odd," corrected Christine. She moved strangely, like a foreign bird. "I still think…" She paused, looking into his eyes. "Yup. Still odd." She turned her attention to the kitchen faucet and got herself some water.

Danny laughed. It didn't make any more sense to him than the first time she'd said it, and he looked to Laura for an explanation. She was the larger, clumsier cat to Christine's quick bird. She shook her head. "If you figure her out, you'll be the first. Christine's an art major."

"I know several art majors and none of them are like her."

Laura shrugged, grinning. "Well, she's also a little crazy."

"I'm right here, you know."

Laura glanced down at her. "Sorry."

"That's alright. I'll leave and let you two meet each other." Laura made a small, nervous, appreciative curtsey to her, at which Christine nodded and bobbed off into the crowd.

Laura cleared her throat. "So, what's the army like?"

"Air Force. Some people are pretty touchy about the difference."

"Oh." She laughed awkwardly, covering her mouth with an open hand. "Sorry."

Danny smiled. "It's okay. I'm not."

He told her about the work. He explained the cool drills and exercises, whispering the various tricks and strategies he'd invented to surpass them as Laura listened, fascinated. He made fun of several teachers, cracking small, harmless jokes that never failed to bring a laugh in spite of their harmlessness. She listened eagerly to his tales of the jets and how they took off and landed, but her smile fixed when he started describing the technical stuff. Danny noticed it after a minute and stopped, partly embarrassed. He thought he'd been doing pretty well at the talking game, up to that point. "So uh, what do you… do?"

She told him in a thousand words that bowled him over. She studied geology, and she _loved _going on the field expeditions—did he know that last year they went to _China_? China! This rich guy died and left them so much money that they were able to go rock-hunting in _China_! Danny voiced his amazement and privately wondered if he'd created a monster by asking her about herself. She went on to tell him facts about different sediments and elements that proved interesting, how different gems were created or grew from crystals. Occasionally, Danny jumped in with a token remark of his own opinions, few though they were, on the mineralogical world.

Their legs had tired earlier in the conversation, but they'd found space on a soft couch in the living room. Since then, it had become crowded to capacity and they could barely hear themselves speaking. Those who'd had too much to drink made themselves painfully obvious.

"It's quieter upstairs," Laura suggested.

Danny stood and held out a hand to help her up. "Alright." They thumped up the stairs and its gray carpeting, squeezing past those engrossed in conversation there. Laura led the way to a door near the end of the hall, picking a key from her pocket to unlock it. Danny ambled in and looked around, several alarms going off as he noticed that this happened to be a girl's dorm room. Laura apologized for the mess, the clothes on the floor and the papers scattered across her desk, but Danny told her not to worry about it. As she straightened up a few things, Danny tried to loosen up. He was just being paranoid. That was all.

Laura motioned to her bed, a single with a plain purple comforter lying in wrinkles atop it, unmade from last night's sleep. Beside it stood a closet and a dresser, the wall decorated with a mirror. Makeup and other girl stuff littered the top of the dresser. For no reason at all, the hair rose on Danny's neck. _Purple_.

"You know you can sit down."

"Right." Danny chuckled and sat down stiffly on the bed. "You were saying something about your geology projects?" Talking was a tricky business. It felt like his throat was closing up on him.

"Yes." Laura hadn't turned on the main overhead light. Instead, she clicked on the small desk lamp, which was, he had to admit, still pretty bright. Maybe the overhead bulb was out, and that was why she hadn't turned it on. Maybe girls did this kind of dark-room thing for fun, some kind of girly powwow tradition that he'd never known about. Like periods. Danny didn't know a thing about how girls felt about their periods, his sister notwithstanding, so he couldn't be expected to know their social habits either. It was a proven fact among his gender that women were impossible to comprehend. Anything at all could be happening and he might never know what it was.

If Laura hadn't been there, Danny would have smacked himself. He didn't know who he thought he was kidding. Liar, liar, pants-on-fire.

Laura sat down next to him, very casually, as if there was nothing strange about it at all. "It's a really interesting science." Danny could feel her hips and legs against his own, and the bed sagged a little, pressing her side closer against his. Her voice grew softer, lower and more purposeful. Danny lost the last of his platonic hopes. "You get to see lots of neat things in geology, you know."

He gulped. "Sounds like fun."

Laura had eyes the color of rosewood, and they bore down on him as she lifted her arm around his shoulder and gently turned him towards her, for a kiss. Her lips moved against his own, opening to take his lip, nipping at it, her head ducking like a deer at the stream as she tasted him. Danny had to admit, the sensation wasn't at all unpleasant. Almost without awareness, his arms rose around her own shoulders, caressing her upper arms as Laura's own hands rested lightly on his chest, moving up to explore his neck, brushing against his ears and moving her fingers in small, massaging circles right behind the lobes. He couldn't suppress a groan of pleasure, but anxiety lingered at the edge of his mind.

Laura pulled away and, grinning, her amber eyes shining, pushed him back on the bed. Danny pulled his feet off the floor, scooting back on the bed and allowing her to crawl atop him, her hair falling around him like a curtain as her scent bore down on him, something like delicate baby powder and carnations. She held herself up on her hands and knees, tilting her head down to kiss him. Danny welcomed her lips and opened her mouth with his tongue, reaching his arms around her, pressing her to his body as she eased her waist down on him. Her hands slid under his shirt, rubbing her palms across the muscles the military had given him, exploring his body with the soft touch of her fingers. He breathed deeper at the delighting touch, and, uncertainly, Danny began to return it. His hands brushed the hem of her top, and she generously assisted him, taking him by the wrist and pushing his cupped hand under her shirt to her breast.

Through the coarse jeans, Danny could feel himself throbbing against her stomach. The soft, round curve of her breast with its hard protruding nipple was beyond words in its sensation. He wanted their clothes to be off, to hear her crying out from underneath him—but he also wanted, with all his heart, to be encased in a freezing shell with no possibility of redemption. The mixed emotion had no middle ground, no area of truce that would leave him peace. As he goaded on his lust he picked a chord of rising terror, growing faster than desire, echoing like a scream throughout his mind. As it rose in volume and insistency, Laura began to buck her hips slowly against his body.

_Purple._

Danny froze.

"Get off." He was going to be sick. If his throat didn't close he was going to vomit.

"Hummm?" Laura met his eyes, confused. "What?"

"Please." His voice cracked in the middle of the word. "Just go away."

"What's wrong?" She'd stopped her caresses, but she still hadn't moved.

"Nothing." Her lips tightened, and Danny, out of a near-complete verbal vacuum, grasped at the first and worst line in the vast tome of love's excuses, made all the more intolerable for its feminine associations.

"It's not you." He sighed haltingly, the breath catching in his throat along the way. "It's me."

She held his eyes for an instant longer. Then she slapped him. She slapped him so hard that his face stung. Danny closed his eyes. A tear ran down her face, and she slapped him again. Laura scooted off the bed, shaking it with furious movements, and stomped out her door. The party noise rushed in as the door opened, but when it closed, the room grew solemn once more.

Danny looked at the white of the ceiling, illuminated and shadowed by the desk lamp. His throat had opened up, and he no longer felt the bile rising, but it continued to feel as though somebody was frying his brains on a skillet. Fury and despair and resentful lust popped and boiled, preventing any cogent thought, and Danny turned on his stomach, avoiding the pillows, and waited for it to pass. After a few quiet minutes, it did, at least enough for him to try and sort things out.

Something was wrong with him. He should have been able to go through with it, but he hadn't, because _PURPLE_. He didn't know why it should matter that the comforter was purple. Laura was a little big, but very beautiful, and he had definitely been ready for her, but for whatever psycho little reason, he hadn't been able to do it. _Everybody_ did it, and everybody _wanted _to do it, but _he_ hadn't been able to do it. Danny curled in on himself, his fists shaking, not daring to move. He was absolutely furious. If he got up from that bed, he was going to go out and kill somebody.

After a time, he couldn't have said how long, the door opened again. He didn't bother to see who it was. They could kick him out or get lost, so far as he was concerned.

"I told her it was a bad idea."

Christine.

She came up and stood at the foot of the bed. Danny listened; her feet didn't scuff the floor, and her breath was even. She didn't come closer, and Danny kept his eyes squeezed shut. He waited in agony for her to state the painfully obvious. That he was a wreck. That he shouldn't have been such a jerk to her friend, that he should get out of her room and never come back. He waited, but she didn't say anything. Danny let go of his knees and let his legs out straight, turning on his side and leaning up slightly to get a look at her. Her eyes narrowed, expressing that same concentrated curiosity as before. Danny realized the reason when he ran a check on himself. His eyes were glowing bright emerald. He let them glow. Let her see what a screwball he was.

Her mouth parted. "Who are you?"

Danny shook his head and looked away. It was a fact in math and science that what is impossible to explain cannot be understood. Christine came around the side of the bed and kneeled on the floor, facing him. She folded her arms across the comforter and set down her head, her face perfectly level with his.

Fatigue swept up on Danny like a wave. Her blue eyes were pools, and though they burned with curious vivacity, he felt that they were safe. His shoulders relaxed, his fists opening loosely onto the bed. This whole night seemed like a dream; things happened randomly and suddenly, without control. The world spun like a top, and he didn't have a clue why or how it did it. Christine started to cry. Her eyes shone, the light of the desk lamp shimmering in them like stars on a quiet pool. Army camp was a good example. Danny had picked it out of a hat. Why? He didn't know. She cried silently, her shoulders shaking just the slightest bit. He didn't know what he was doing on this planet, a creature without a name or a single face, just a computer. A Pentium VI, Ray had called him, and he hadn't known how right he was. Danny hated math. Hated it with a passion, yet he was good at it, and he was usually happy to do it. The numbers and letters without meaning, shapes and abstractions that didn't mean a single thing in the world.

Danny slid into unconsciousness as Christine's mouth contorted in a grimace of pain, sobbing in little hiccups as tears streamed from the pools of her eyes.

XXX

Danny woke up alone in the room. The sun peeked through the curtains, and he saw that the desk lamp had been turned out. It was already late in the morning, and he would have missed several classes already. The bed felt foreign under him, and he stood up quickly and brushed out his wrinkled clothes, wishing he had taken some alcohol last night. That way, he might at least pretend that it hadn't happened, or that he'd imagined it, but as things were, Danny was sure that most of what he remembered had been brutally real. His head pounded, but it wasn't from a hangover.

A peek out the door revealed no danger. Trappings from the party lay scattered about the hall, and Danny made a mental note to kick Ray's sorry butt if he ever came by his room again. He crept down the stairs and stepped over several of last night's party animals, reduced now to drooling piles on the floor. By the time Danny returned to his dorm it was late in the afternoon, since he didn't know where Ray was and he didn't dare thumb a ride. The upshot was that, by the time he got back to his own dorm, he had filled his head with enough numbers and figures that he'd almost managed to push last night from his mind entirely. He gathered the things he needed, stole a cookie from the small first-floor snack fridge, and sprinted off to try and make his next class.

On his way out of electrical mechanics, he bumped into Christine. "Hi."

She averted her eyes and kept her head down, slowing her step just long enough to mumble a hello before sweeping past him and down the hall. Danny frowned after her, sighed, and went on to his own class.

XXX

He finished junior year without incident, and senior year flew by in a gust of roaring success. Danny's parents were thrilled with him and told him so, coming up from Amity to watch him cross the stage, bragging casually to other parents of their son's achievement. They never expected him to do so well. Throughout both junior and senior years, Danny had developed nearly into a machine, retaining just enough personality to avoid unsavory attention. He studied extra material, he performed with greater efficiency than ever, and he finally managed to punch Ray, who responded by calling him a pathetic sack of feces. Those who heard the disturbance guessed what must have happened and smiled. Ray had it coming. Danny merely smiled from his seat at his desk, waving goodbye as Ray stormed from the room shouting obscenities.

Danny was the star of his class. Following graduation, he served his mandatory time in the Air Force reserves, then entered flight school with an enthusiastic letter of recommendation from every one of his military teachers. They commended him for his mathematical dexterity, his prowess in mechanics, and his exceptional interpersonal skills.

* * *

A/N: Thoughts? 


	6. Trainee

A/N: I almost meshed this and the next chapter together, but I thought 6.5k was enough for one chap. Once again, I know very little about AF training but I did all the research I could--which, unfortunately, wasn't a whole lot. To answer kitten's question, yes, Danny is still a virgin. To respond to Life's constructive criticism, I appreciate your honest opinion and thank you muchly for the compliments. To everybody in general: the complexity in that last bit had me worried about yoos guys, but it seems like most of you picked it up (at least the important parts) no problem. Yay for clever reviewers!

Mars

By JadeRabbyt

"I really looked up to him back then, but now that I think about it, it's possible that he was a sociopath—you know they're supposed to be able to live normal lives, and you never know they're rotten until they turn on you? I guess he might have been too good to be true."  
--Taylor Gypsum

Danny arrived at the training base with a duffel bag slung over his shoulder and a dark green uniform that stuck to his chest in the summer heat. He had his letters of recommendation and the things he'd learned in school, how to command and how to lead and how to take orders from others who knew more and had seen more than himself. For experience, he had a year and a half of service in the reserves, learning there to put his education into practice. Arriving in a shuttle he'd taken from the airport, cramped in the sweating metal box with ten or twelve others, he came now as one of many whose dream it had been to fly. Most of the kids in the shuttle with him still carried that dream, though an outsider never would have guessed it to look at them. All wore the same dark green uniforms with button-closed pockets over their hearts, black boots that made their loose pant legs bunch at the calves. They had caps of the same color on their heads or in their hands, wagging it back and forth in their tired fingers. They slumped back in their seats or huddled forward, chins in their hands, staring out the wide fiberglass windows at the rolling desert beyond.

A cracked cement sidewalk ran alongside the road, and every once in a while they would pass somebody. Often the somebody wore shorts and a t-shirt, sandals over feet which were either bare or wrapped in sweat socks. Hearing the shuttle's diesel roar behind them, the traveler would turn his head just enough to recognize it, catching a glance of its plain black form. Then he'd ignore it, smiling to himself at how such a common thing could be such a mystery. Military shuttles passed through town regularly on their way to the base, but few recognized the emotions, aspirations, and rich lives of those inside. The noisy buses were a mystery. It passed the walker in a cloud of dust and diesel, and if he craned his neck, raising up on his toes or spending the effort to jump, he'd see a handful of uniformed young men, hot in spite of the shuttle's air conditioning, speaking little or not at all, looking for all the world like real-life models of children's toys.

Toys did not dream, but these kids did. Inside the shuttle the air crackled with tension. They all pretended to rest, but their heads buzzed with questions and apprehensions. The most relaxed of them, a man with his hands on his stomach and his feet stretched out—cap resting atop his face—couldn't help but consider the times to come. None of them had ever flown a jet before. All of them had seen diagrams and photographs, and most had gone through some kind of preliminary training, but none of them had actually been allowed to sit in the pilot's seat. Smaller craft, certainly. Commercial jets, naturally. But a real military jet—that was something new. Their fingers itched for the controls and the opportunity. Those who slouched repositioned themselves every twenty minutes or so, their butts having slid too far down the seats, and when they did move it was with quick, irritated gestures, shoving themselves back up and settling resolutely into their chosen postures. The driver watched the farce in his mirror, glancing up from the road from time to time. Sometimes the kids talked, sometimes they didn't, but whenever he made an airport run there was always this same air of forced, impatient, ambivalence among his passengers. He found it funny, in an innocent way.

Lately though, the kids had been even more uptight than usual. In the old days, the late nineties and early two thousands, there hadn't been much at all for them to worry their heads over. They'd fidgeted a lot more in his shuttle back then. It was all naïve anxiety, no significant worries at all. They wanted to know if they could cut the mustard. They wanted to know for sure that they could be the heroic girl-magnet flyboys they'd always wanted to be—not even their training could beat those dreams out of them, a fact which made the wrinkled, paunchy, wizened old driver proud. In those not-so-distant days, they had a good chance of keeping their hands clean. Not anymore, with this stuff over Taiwan. Everybody had their collars tight over this thing with Taiwan. The driver had tried to sort out what it meant exactly, why the Big Reds were trying for that industrial island now, but it was difficult. The talking heads said many things about world conquest and strength and armed force and greed, but the bus driver couldn't sort it out, and privately he didn't think anybody else could either. He suspected it was something with ideology. If China wanted Taiwan for itself, that was its business. If Uncle Sam wanted a free Taiwan, then that was his business. The talking heads could debate dollar signs all day, but in the driver's opinion, God only knew what made perfectly decent people try to kill each other. He sure couldn't understand it. Then again, that was probably why he was still a bus driver, or 'personnel transporter.'

XXX

Danny watched the base approach through the shuttle's windshield. They had gone through a small town half an hour ago, but between there and the base up ahead he hadn't seen anything but a few wooden structures scattered on the landscape. He guessed the problem was noise. He wouldn't buy a house next to an Air Force base either, considering the roars of the supersonics. Of course, he wouldn't buy a house in the desert, either. If he ever wanted a permanent place to live, he'd probably go for an apartment in the East, anyway.

His new home the base loomed up ahead, a sprawling complex of gray and white buildings, rounded hangars, and wide blacktopped spaces. Air shimmered in the distance over a black stripe of tar which must be a runway. He couldn't see any planes. They were still too far away to make out anything in detail, but it was obvious that the camp was alive. Cars and trucks rumbled between the buildings, filling wide parking lots and milling around the pavement. The base looked the size of a small city, and all of it had to be occupied if they were to provide housing for everybody. Danny worried about the number of planes and how often they would let him go up. Of course, before he could go up there would be a ton of prep work, exercises, and miscellaneous nonsense like that. That would be alright, he supposed. Danny was good at nonsense. He had gotten a minor award for his proficiency at nonsense back in the ROTC. Eventually he'd make it, but it was difficult for Danny to wait when he'd practically memorized every layout he'd managed to get his hands on.

Danny could draw and explain circuit diagrams. He knew enough to teach a class on flight theory and application, on the benefits of the various wing designs and how each plane's construction suited its chosen purpose be it a bomber, a fighter, a fueler, or a freighter. He knew about the cockpit and communications and the rudders and the engines, he knew nearly enough to build a small civilian plane from all the technical manuals he'd read through, but they were going to teach it to him all over again once he got to the base. No matter. He'd get there eventually.

When the shuttle stopped at last, Danny piled out with the others and listened to a brief sermon from an officer who ranked them. He told them about the duty, tradition, and bravery associated with those who passed through the aptly-named Rockfield AF training base and ordered them to live up to it. The heat made them all sweat, and the speech didn't last long. Following check-in at the office by a frowning man with prickly short-cut hair, Danny set out in search of his room. With the help of a map and several posted signs, he managed to find his way without too much trouble.

The complex was every bit the hive of activity it had appeared from the shuttle. People marched in lines or stood by with clipboards, scribbling mysteriously. Others stood less formally by the buildings, exchanging funny stories or describing something or other that might need fixing or replacement. Just about everybody was in uniform, although a few people dressed in shorts or casual shirts. Those looked like visitors, and like Danny, they kept their eyes open and wondering. Unlike him, they did not have a place here. Even though Danny was unfamiliar with the base, and although he watched the big trucks and vans rumble by with startled curiosity, just like the every other new arrival—he felt perfectly natural being there. Things fit into place. Some gave orders, and others followed them. Many of those in uniform walked quickly and without distraction, recognizing their friends with short calls before continuing with their jobs. Few lingered. People with a purpose don't need to linger.

Danny reached his building and used a key to unlock the door. He found his room and dumped his stuff inside, letting out a slow breath as he surveyed its bare white interior. A bed, a dresser, a trash can and some shelves. Perfect. The people looked perfect and his room was perfect. In a strange way, it was like he'd come home. He needn't have worried about his transfer here.

The voices of his peers drifted down the hallway. Danny left his things and followed the sounds to a door down the hall which gave in to a small break room. They welcomed him and accepted him with garrulous joviality, and Danny fit in without a hitch. They were like him in ways that others weren't. They had control and dedication and they took things seriously. Danny was not as loud or opinionated as the rest of them, but they were still clearly his people in spite of that. They were ready for action, no matter that they didn't know quite what that action was, exactly. Danny's unique experience told him that expectation and reality frequently had very little in common. It disappointed him that this outlook set him apart. He laughed quietly as he joked with them, but he kept his ideas and his suspicions to himself, remaining a passive sounding board to their voices, participating when necessary, remaining quiet when socially acceptable. They were amiable people, and they shared his work ethic and taste for flight. That was more than enough to have in common. Already this place seemed like a good dream.

XXX

The classes came and went, and Danny managed to learn much he hadn't known before. They did lots of outdoor exercises and in-class studying, and the on-site library was peerless in its resources. Danny spent much of his free time in his room, studying, but the guys would, as a team, drag him out and into town for some fun. Most of the time, 'fun' meant 'bar.' Nobody was an alcoholic, but the loud atmosphere and close, human feel of the bar leant itself to merry-making and jolly social congregations which Danny did manage to enjoy. He'd talk with the others about the planes or gossip about instructors as he sipped something non-alcoholic, and he made plenty of acquaintances, but no really close friends. He didn't have time for them, and even if he had, he didn't see a need for them.

XXX

"So why do you want to be a pilot, anyway?"

Danny looked up from his stack of papers. He had a folder full of copies of technical papers recommended to him by others, the whole stack topped off with a thin book on flight theory. The ambush took him by surprise. Walking beside him was Taylor, who slurped coffee from a styrofoam cup.

The sun still hung weakly in the evening sky, and the air had cooled enough for such odd conversations to seem almost normal. "What?"

"A pilot. Why did you want to be one?" Taylor was one of those people who probably wouldn't last longer than five years. He asked too many stupid questions and, while he obeyed, he wasn't the best at taking orders.

"What's your interest?"

Taylor kicked a pebble and glanced at Danny's books. "I don't know. You just strike me as kind of a weird guy. The rest of us, we're formal and rigid and all the rest of it, but you're the guy everybody wants to be."

Danny couldn't imagine why.

"You're like everybody's grandfather's best friend who was out there on the battlefield with them. You're focused and devoted, but you still know how to have a good time. You're cool and everybody likes you." Taylor paused, laughing a little. "I'm sorry. This isn't exactly a typical question. I was just wondering if you had a secret, some kind of super pill or something that the rest of us don't know about."

Danny couldn't come up with an answer to that one. He remembered being a little distracted early on in college. High school had been the beginning of his model building, but that hadn't contributed anything significant to his attitude. There was something else that had happened at the same time he'd started work on the planes, but when he tried to pin it down the memory flitted out of his reach. He let it go. "Sorry to disappoint you, but I guess I'm just a natural." Danny considered what Taylor had said, about the others looking up to him. In a weird way, it made sense, though Taylor was definitely exaggerating the effect. "I do my best. That's all."

He wasn't satisfied, but he let Danny alone. Danny continued on to his room, wondering about the forgotten memory. He knew it was there, but he couldn't get it down. It was the weirdest thing. In the back of his mind, something told him that it was better left forgotten, and the moment Danny opened his latest reading material, even the memory of the memory escaped his grasp, replaced with flux diagrams and the winding calculations of fluid dynamics.

XXX

"The Chinese are gearing for battle. Everybody knows it." Greg sat in the lounge, one arm thrown over the top of the couch cushions. His pointed nose stuck in the air as he leaned back. "Satellites don't lie."

"People have been saying that for years, and nothing's happened." Steven moved a rook on the chessboard. "Check." Across from him, Danny mourned the imminent loss of still more pieces.

"Yes, but that was before Taiwan sold us those amazing engines. You remember that? Those things are _fast_. And nobody saw that coming."

"I thought those engines were just a myth," Danny muttered. He had to watch his bishop. It was the only thing between Steve-O and his king.

Greg smiled at the plottings of the chessboard. "That's what everybody wanted everybody else to think. But those things are hot. There's this guy on the internet says they're nuke-powered."

Steven smirked. "That's just ridiculous. You can't shield the pilot from radiation well enough for nuke power to work."

"If they found a way to make a shield work, it could take us into space."

Steven looked up at his opponent. "What was that?"

Danny shook his head. "I don't know. Just an idea." He couldn't say where that particular remark had come from. He glanced at the sky from time to time, but not with any serious interest.

"Here's another thing everybody knows: NASA is on its last leg." Greg crossed his legs on the couch. "Space? I think not. It's the military applications that China's worried about."

"I miss NASA." Steven sighed. "That Mars probe was great. Do you guys remember that? It was late nineties, or somewhere around there." They remembered it, alright. Danny made a move, threatening a rook with his knight. Steven grimaced. "Rats."

XXX

The jets shone in slick, brilliant perfection on the airfield. The birds perched elegantly on the pavement, waiting for the platoon of trainees making their way towards them. Danny had seen the old jets in movies and had of course studied the more recent models in books and filmed documentaries, but these crafts were amazing. The transparent glass of the cockpit fit snuggly between two metal plates, like a skylight. The nostrum flowed into four wings alongside the body, two on top, two on bottom, each with smooth projections hanging beneath them, the vented engines. The metal shone a smooth blue-black.

"I'll take each of you up one at a time. As you were told back in the briefing room, you'll have an opportunity to practice several basic maneuvers before landing. Any questions?" There were none. The officer nodded. "Good. Gregory Spalding, you're first."

The rest of the class watched Greg and the trainer climb into the cockpit as another instructor stayed with the main group, reviewing flight maneuvers, proper communication protocols, and preflight checking. They'd had it all memorized for years, and none listened with more than half an ear. After a moment of watching the two heads bob in the cockpit, the jet rolled onto the runway. The engines glowed orange and heated white, the jet leaped forward and escaped the runway, having run along no more than twenty feet of pavement before taking off.

The class had learned enough and seen enough not to be surprised, but few among them were unimpressed.

The jet buzzed gloriously into the sky and made a simple turn, flew level, and remained in the air for a pitiful ten minutes before touching down. Greg jumped out of the cockpit looking like he'd won the lottery, but he didn't say anything. Not only would a comment have been unprofessional, but it was unnecessary besides.

Danny waited his turn as the others went up. He watched how their planes moved and guessed at the momentum and at the centrifugal force of the turns, trying to think how he should fly. It would be hard to tell until he actually got the controls in his hands, but Danny didn't think they would give him any trouble. The things could turn on a dime, and they were perfectly balanced besides. Technology had come a long, long way in ten years.

At last it was his turn. The instructor called his name and led him up to the jet, its engines still hot from the landing. Danny climbed into the cockpit with the instructor behind him, meeting a host of familiar and unfamiliar buttons, levers, and view screens. The instructor's voice crackled in Danny's ear through his helmet. "This is a special training plane. The buttons you know, work. The ones you don't know have been deactivated and are used for more advanced techniques."

"A dummy plane." He should have remembered that sooner. These machines had become so complex that you couldn't learn them all at once. You had to take them in parts.

"Correct." The instructor ordered him to proceed through the pre-flight checks, and Danny grasped the handles which controlled altitude, tilt, and speed. The slightest twitch to either of them sent electrical impulses shooting along the electrical wiring and into the complex ailerons at the wings and tail, and probably several other places as well. Danny hadn't had a chance to study this model. The material he would have needed to do so was all classified. Instead, Danny situated himself in the firm black fabric mesh of the pilot seat, adjusting to the feel of the it as the instructor crackled in his ear, monitoring Danny's pre-flight adjustments, making sure the student didn't accidentally blow something up. As destructive as they were the jets were delicate. In the hands of the wrong idiot, they could blow themselves up.

Danny completed the last of the checks and eased the big bird into gear, feeling the engine rumbling beneath him as it worked to turn the classic rubber wheels. A roar signaled the ignition of the bright wing engines, and the instructor gave him the okay for takeoff. His hands shaking almost imperceptibly, Danny punched the buttons that ordered the jet to fly.

The acceleration slammed Danny back in his seat and for a moment the asphalt beneath him raced away unbelievably, the whole craft vibrating, then he was in the air and flying faster than he'd ever flown before. The sparse desert clouds flew up in his face, and the jet handled like a dream—the controls were almost too delicate. The slick military jet split the air like a hot knife through butter. Danny had to restrain himself from trying anything fancy.

"You remember the basic turn."

"Yessir."

"Do it. Make a single pass directly over the base."

"Yessir."

'The craft', the instructor had called it. Dummy plane or not, that seemed like an unnecessarily vulgar name for this glorious modern miracle. Danny adjusted the controls, feeling the plane react as an extension of his own body, tilting it into a curve that put them at a near right-angle to the ground, pressing his butt and spine against the seat before continuing straight to make a single pass roughly a thousand feet over the top of the base's control tower.

"Nice work." The instructor made him do a couple more turns, some tighter, some looser, operating at different speeds, but Danny was ordered to land much too soon in his own opinion. Pouting silently, he brought the plane down toward the runway, angling the nose up, letting the two back wheels touch down before bringing the nose in line. The jet bounced once or twice, but they told him it was definitely one of the better landings performed that day.

XXX

"Did you learn this game from a pro or what?" Taylor shook his head as Steven snatched his queen off the board. "I'm starting to look like a noob, here."

"You strike me as the kind of guy who would be better at checkers." Steven smiled, clasping his hands behind his head and kicking his feet out under the chess board-bearing table. "Chess isn't for everybody."

"I didn't say I was a moron." Taylor contemplated his next move, but things didn't look good for him. He'd already lost a handful of pawns, a knight, and a rook, and now that his queen was gone it was only a matter of time before Steven mated him.

Greg watched the board through half-lidded eyes. "See, that's why I prefer the couch."

"Because you can't fail if you never try?" Steven guessed. A couple guys playing pool overheard the comment and chuckled.

"Noooo," Greg answered. "It's because I'm storing energy to spend later on things that matter."

"Hm." Taylor moved his pawn to back up his remaining rook. There was something to what Greg said. He may be a couch potato in the break room, but he was a terror in the sky. Next to Danny, Greg had distinguished himself as the best pilot in the group since they'd first begun to practice. "Hey, anybody know where Danny is? Is he busy with homework or sneaking back to the airfield."

"Neither. The man got himself busted yesterday." Steve killed Taylor's pawn with a knight. "Check."

"That so?" Taylor whistled, ignoring the game for the moment. "What'd he do?"

"They told him to do some fancy maneuver and he did it wrong," Greg explained.

"Really? Just that?"

Steven crossed his arms. "He did it wrong on purpose. He thought he knew a better way to do it better, but now he's got mess duty for three weeks."

Taylor winced. "Ouch."

"Well, that's what happens when you screw with the brass." Steven smiled. "And speaking of people being screwed…"

"I know, shut up." Taylor ran his hands through his hair and returned his attention to the chess board. "I'm thinking."

XXX

The food might taste alright, but the kitchen smelled like a biochemical weapons factory. Lumps of eggs in huge vats and the sticky frying of bread on the big stove's hotplates—it made Danny's face sweat and his eyes run. The gloves, far from being an aid, almost seemed to make things worse. It was better than leaving streaks of skin across the three-hundred-degree hotplates, but only just barely. He grabbed a tray of fries from a salter and dumped them in a service bucket.

The men in line looked up briefly as Danny emerged from the kitchen and deposited the fries, then grabbed the tongs and served themselves from the fresh batch. One of the looked a little longer at him, recognizing his face. Danny braced himself.

"How the mighty have fallen, eh Danny-boy?"

"Very original. That's the eighth time in two days, Desmond." Frank Desmond sneered at him and continued down the line, following the counter with its trays of French toast, waffles, sausage, eggs, and sour fruit. Danny went back to the kitchen for more of the foul-smelling stuff, checking the thermometer on some sausages. The grease crackled and bubbled. A drop of it leaped up and stung his chin. Danny caught his breath at the sharp sting and wiped it quickly with the back of his glove, smearing grease and burnt food remains across his face. As Danny simmered with frustration, one of the regular help chuckled.

"It takes a while to get used to it. Go ahead and wash up at the sink. I'll cover for you."

"Thanks." Danny went and did exactly that. He could hardly believe this. One stupid mistake and it was hell-on-hotplates for an entire three weeks. They wouldn't even tell him why what he'd done was wrong.

XXX

Jacob snatched a rag off the work bench and wiped his grease-blackened hands. He frowned at the air intake mechanism, tangled in a nebula of its own dissembled parts on the metal mechanic's table. There was a malfunction in the thing somewhere, he was certain. Where the malfunction was, now that another problem entirely. Jacob stalked back to the desktop computers and tapped a few keys, bringing up the jet's report of its own ailment. The computer said that the air intake had been palpitating like a human heart attack, but that was impossible because the intake elevator screws were adjusted properly and working perfectly. He'd just finished checking them. It was either the computer's problem or the computer sensor's problem, and it was Jacob Zeev's paid work and duty to determine which it was.

The malfunctioning jet in question squatted behind him, the whole lot enclosed under the protective aluminum dome of a hangar. He'd torn up a couple panels in removing the defective air intake, resting them on the tarp draped over its wings. Jacob climbed his ladder and ducked into the cockpit for another look at the jet's computer. The jets might look smooth and sophisticated sure enough, but in reality they were an even larger pain than the older models. The older models had big struts and moving parts that crapped out. With these, it was always their state-of-the-art computers that broke down, and when the computers broke down, the moving parts could break if the fail-safes managed to fail. He chewed the end of a screwdriver as he started work on the cockpit console. The hardest things to fix were those that were never supposed to break.

"Hello? Mr. Zeev?"

The sound bounced up to him, filled with anonymity. Jacob sighed; he didn't need this, but he had better see what the guy, a trainee from the sound of it, wanted. He lifted his head from the cockpit, peering down at the hangar's cement floor. "Yeah?" The kid didn't look like a trainee. His tangle of black hair fell just within the requirements for length, and he stood roughly six feet tall. Well built, just like all the pilots, with sharp blue eyes that could be seen even from this distance. "Something I can do for you?"

"I want to know why I'm not supposed to execute a half-open twist from over two thousand feet."

Jacob pushed up his goggles. "You want to know what?" The kid had a yellow stain on his shirt.

"They said you were the one who'd have an answer for me."

"I'm the senior mechanic for this outfit. Not a kindergarten teacher." Jacob stuck his head back in the cockpit. He had work to do. "You perform your maneuvers like your commanders tell you and you won't need to worry about any half-open twists from over two thousand feet."

"That's what everybody else has told me. They gave me three weeks' mess hall duty for doing that stupid maneuver at _three _thousand feet. Nobody can tell me why a lousy one thousand feet makes such a difference. They told me to dive, and the twist was the most efficient way to do that."

So that would explain the yellow stain. Mess duty. "It's important because you went against your training. If you'd listened to your betters and done it right, you wouldn't have to flip pancakes." These flyboys. They didn't have the brains for all the details, and if they couldn't listen to orders then they were going to get killed. "Get out of here. I've got work to do."

Jacob heard no more, and he assumed the kid had scrammed. He flipped down his goggles and began to adjust the computer. The air intake would have to go back in so he could get some more readings, but first he had to make sure the computer was calibrated properly. Unscrewing the main panel, Jacob popped open the jet's control console and glanced at the hideous tangle of wires beyond. At least the designers'd had the decency to make the CPU easily accessible in this model. He could feel in his gut that the digitals were off, but there was no sense in being quick with something this delicate. He had to know for sure.

"Is the computer giving you zeroes?"

"No." Finally. He'd requested an assistant five minutes ago. "The main computer's alright. It must be one of the sensors. I'm just getting ready to reinstall the alterior air intake. Go ahead put it back together for me."

Jacob plugged several testing devices into the cockpit's wiring and put the relevant circuits through their paces. One of the numbers came out slightly inaccurate, a result of normal wear on the computer. Jacob adjusted it with a gadget, setting it back within its proper operating range. The glitch wasn't enough to account for the whole malfunction, but it was a good start. No sense in keeping sloppy electronics. Jacob pulled himself out of the cockpit. "I've got the computers lined up. How're you coming on that—" Jacob stopped and swore. "Kid I told you to get out of here. You want another three weeks in mess hall?" The cheeky squirt grinned up at him. He'd been working away on the air intake, doing God only knew what damage to the machinery.

"You said I could take a look at it."

"I thought you were—" Jacob stopped and clenched his teeth. This kid would be lucky if he only got another three weeks. "You're in big trouble, pal."

"I've put it back together. Come down here and have the desktop computer check it out."

Jacob laughed. "Not a chance." He jumped down the ladder and brushed the kid out of the way. What he saw on the table stopped him dead. The device had been completely reassembled, freshly greased and adjusted besides. Jacob masked his astonishment. "It only looks pretty on the outside. I bet its guts are mangled like a meat-worker in a hamburger grinder."

The kid stepped back from the workbench, meeting Jacob's eyes. "Go ahead. Plug in the sensors and let the computers check it out."

Cheeky nail-biting troublemaker. "I will, and then you and me are going to talk to the commanders."

"Fair enough."

Jacob was almost impressed. He seemed pretty sure of himself for an insubordinate twerp. Jacob took the wires from the desktop computers and attached them to the connections on the air intake. Loading a test program, he gave the device the orders the jet would give it under typical flight conditions. The parts moved, the tiny vent flashed, and the thing worked perfectly. "I don't believe it." He licked his lips. "I don't believe a word of it."

"I didn't say anything."

"How did you know how to fix this? I know you guys can fly well enough, but how—"

"I used to build planes when I was a kid." The trainee brushed a spot from the shining metal of the device. "I studied blueprints in high school and kept working from there. This just happened to be one of the things I learned about."

"Just happened to be?" Jacob smiled and raised an eyebrow. "This is a pretty archaic little gadget. You must have an encyclopedia upstairs to have known how to repair it."

The kid was breathing easier, now. He leaned back against the workbench. "Most of these alterior air intakes operate on the same basic principles. It's not a complicated device."

"I guess it isn't." Jacob laughed to himself. Maybe he should have retired after all. He knew kids were good at computers and electronics, but this was ridiculous. "What did you say your name was?"

The kid smiled. "Danny Fenton."

"Call me Jacob. You can't execute a half-open twist from over two thousand feet because it tips the gears the wrong way. Those toys of yours are designed with different gears for different altitudes. The designers have it down so that the engine adjusts itself to operate at maximum efficiency for progressively higher altitudes, and a half-open twist makes it chafe. It's like grinding gears on a stick shift."

"Oh." Danny nodded. "Thanks."

Jacob took a last look at him. Danny Fenton stood up straight, with good posture, but then so did all the others. He had a hard look to his face, but there was intelligence in his flickering eyes. It might be nice to have him around. Jacob could appreciate a guy who was prone to questions. The only problem with them was that if you didn't answer their questions or give them reasons for the orders, they were liable to go screw something up. Just like this Fenton had done. Jacob would rather inform such people than fire them. "I suppose I have room for one more assistant in here, if you'd like to know the details of the matter."

Jacob got a kick out of watching Fenton's face change. He was trying to be professional, but the widening of his eyes gave away his cartwheel-flipping excitement. "I get off around five."

"The bulk of my work comes in around five. See you then, Mr. Fenton."

XXX

"Is that grease on your hands?" Greg sniffed as Danny collapsed on the couch beside him. "That is grease on your hands. And you smell like a machine shop. Is mess duty really that bad?"

Danny laughed. "Actually, no. I got a side job helping out old Zeev with mechanics."

"That's unusual." Greg frowned thoughtfully. "How is it? I think Steven said it best when he called that guy an old codger."

The chess board being abandoned, the fashionable thing to stare at was the lip-chewing players at the pool table. "I can see how he'd give that impression." An understatement, Greg thought. "He's a little rough, but he knows every bolt of those planes. A couple more weeks with him and I'll be able to build a jet myself."

They were both quiet for a moment, Greg meditating on the couch, Danny catching his breath and thanking whoever had decorated the place for such a soft couch, both of them listening to the plastic sound of colliding pool balls. Only six people were in the rec room today. There was Greg next to him and the two at the pool table, and behind them, a couple people were playing cards. Poker, from the sound of it.

Greg broke the peace with a casual comment that hit like a sledgehammer. "I hear we're being shipped out soon."

Danny almost jumped off the couch. "What!"

"Can it. I don't mean right now, soon. I mean a year or two, soon."

"Why? Wait, let me guess." Danny paused, leaning his knuckles against his forehead. "Taiwan."

"Bing-go," Greg intoned. The pool balls clacked on the pool table. "They're gearing for war with the Reds. What do you say to that?"

"Should be… interesting." Danny tried to imagine himself in the middle of a dogfight. In his mind's eye it looked clean, himself zipping around like the world's greatest hero, but the shadow of reality darkened the mood considerably. He knew the U.S. jets well enough to fear whatever anybody else had developed.

"Interesting." Greg bobbed his head. "That's a good word for it." He ran a hand over the soft, well-worn fabric of the cushions. "I'm sure going to miss this couch if we do get shipped out." They both knew that the couch was the least that would be missed, but neither pilot could help feeling a little excited—a small burst of fire that settled like a hot coal in the chest—at the prospect of testing himself in actual combat. "It's probably nothing." Greg leaned back with pretentious ambivalence. "You know how rumors fly."

"Like jets?"

Greg smiled. "You got it."

* * *

A/N: I think we all know what'll happen in the next chapter. 


	7. Pilot

A/N: Let's hear it for insanely long chaps! Whoo! Also, I should mention that yes, I should have edited this more and I know it, but if I can't wrap this sucker up by 9/18, I'll almost certainly never finish it at all. 9/18 is when I go to college, and where I'm going, physics is lord and writing is witchcraft, more or less literally. I'd rather be a good student than a witch, plus I'm a physicist at heart, not a writer. Anyway, long story short, if you don't want this story to be unfinished forever, please review! It really does help, and you guys have been awesome all throughout this hideously doomful tale.

Mars

By JadeRabbyt

"We called him Miracle Boy. I never knew how he survived or where he went, but the kid was amazing."  
--Dr. Heller Petrury

The welder's roar grated on Danny's ears. It was a strange sound, a hissing and deep chinking, a cross of the tiger's blistering roar the sheering whine of a buzz-saw. It wouldn't damage the hearing, but its fantastic noise reminded the mechanic of the seriousness of his work. The welder itself consisted of a pair of large, heavy metal pliers which held a thin straw of carbon pinched between their jaws. A thick cable connected the pliers to a generator, charging the carbon straw with sparking electrical power. When the straw was touched to a plate of metal, the deadly voltage liquefied both the carbon straw and the metal it touched. That was how the welder worked, and Danny, hunched over a wing plate he'd anchored against a work bench, wondered if this would be his last time operating one.

They were shipping out. Danny would have to spend the next two days packing, listening to various briefings, preparing some jets for the transfer. He wouldn't have time to fool around with old Zeev any more, which was regrettable. He'd miss Zeev, but Danny had gotten to the point where he could handle the routine problems without asking a single thing of the old man. He'd miss Zeev, but Danny wouldn't need him anymore.

"You're going out of line," somebody was shouting. Danny almost missed it over the welder's considerable racket.

"Hm? Oh!" Idiot. He'd welded the thing crooked. The metal wasn't irreparably damaged, but if Zeev hadn't stopped him, it might have become so. Danny flipped up his face mask. "Ah, geez. Sorry about that, I guess I wasn't—"

"You weren't paying attention," Zeev finished. He rested one arm against the table, leaned over the metal plate and scowled. "Eh, you can still fix it, but I think you'd better let one of the others do it. If you're too distracted."

"No, I can finish it." Danny slipped off his gloves and took a closer look at the wrinkled seam in the metal. He could finish it.

Zeev glanced over his shoulder. "Alright. Just keep your mind on your work this time." Glaring once more at the plate, he turned to leave.

"Zeev," Danny stopped him. "I won't be coming in after this Thursday. They're moving me and some others to the coast."

"I know." The old man looked evenly at him. An inch or two shorter than his impromptu apprentice, Zeev had to look up to make eye contact with Danny, and his balding head and blue coveralls didn't lend him much dignity. Unlike many others in the military, those with their starched uniforms and various pins of rank and accomplishment, Zeev's authority lay in the hard lines of his face, the skeptical, case-hardened point of his sharp nose and squinting eyes, eyes capable of seeing through humans and machines alike. Professional mechanics, Danny had discovered, were capable, dependable, and knowledgeable people, and Zeev was their king.

"I know you'll be leaving." Zeev picked at the welded seam, scuffing the cooled metal with the blunt tips of his fingers. "And I want you to remember what I taught you here. Got that?"

Danny nodded. "Got it."

"I won't be around to tell you why and why not anymore. You listen to your commanders, and you do what they say. Got that?"

"Yes, sir."

"You've learned to be a mechanic, but never forget that what you are is a pilot, and pilots are not supposed to be mechanics."

Danny smiled. "Thanks. I think I get the point."

"Mm. You make sure you do." Zeev paused, his face to cracking in a sardonic half-smile. "Because I want to hear that you got a medal someday. Not that you got your tin-can birdy shot down somewhere over North Korea by those Godforsaken Communists."

"You'll hear only good things about me, Zeev. And you will be hearing about me."

The old mechanic smiled warmly and clapped him on the back. "Excellent. If I had a dozen people like you I could retire and watch sitcoms all day."

Danny laughed. "Thank goodness you don't, then."

"True enough. Now get back to work on that wing plate. I like you, but I won't have you slacking."

XXX

The parting with his parents had no such grace or goodwill. To his family's regret and Danny's disguised relief, he had dropped farther and farther out of touch with them over the years. Back in Amity, his parents' standard of living had slowly risen as Jack got promoted and Maddie joined the state university, but in spite of their success, whenever Danny returned to his childhood home he found the same puzzling cloud of doom and defeat. It repulsed Danny, and he did his best to avoid it.

Jazz was another story. She had just gotten out of medical school. The last Danny had heard, she was working an internship in a psychology lab at an East Coast hospital studying Down's syndrome, and she visited Amity regularly. Jazz was the draft horse that kept the family going, dragging the muted shame of her parents and Danny's own stubborn alienation behind her. She called up her brother every Thanksgiving and towed him into Amity for Christmas, and to her credit, she made him enjoy it. As much as Danny loathed the old days of ghosts and spooks, there was something funny in them when you looked from the right angle. Like how a ghost posing as a psychiatrist would try sucking the misery from a high school, and why hadn't anybody thought of that before? You could probably power New York for hours on the average high-schooler's self-pity. Mostly though, she drew the conversation toward other, more modern things, funny accidents that had happened on her internship or in Dad's garage. She certainly never brought up Taiwan.

Danny had one week of vacation time to use before his departure, and in that week he returned home to his parents. He hadn't particularly wanted to do it, but it was the only appropriate thing to do with the international hostilities being what they were. Unfortunately, the visit went nothing like Christmas, although he probably should have expected that. His parents clung to him like barnacles, which was understandable but irritating. They were just so proud of him, proud and worried and terrified that he wouldn't come back, though they never mentioned that last part out loud. After the first couple days, Danny began to wish he'd joined Greg in Los Angeles.

There was nowhere to go when he tired of his parents. He wasn't interested in visiting anyone. Many of his classmates had moved away, and most of those still around lived with their parents. Dash Baxter worked as a valet for some two-star restaurant out of town, a fact which made Danny smirk. Kwan had played football in college and gone on to the minor leagues, Jazz told him. That was good to know. Kwan always was a pretty cool guy.

Mostly, Danny hung out around home, trying not to think too hard about anything and doing his best to enjoy his parents. In pursuit of those goals, he watched television—lots of television. On his fourth day, his mother approached him and relaxed into an armchair. It was obvious she wanted to talk, so Danny put the TV on mute and waited.

"Danny, you know I love you." She paused, folding her small hands in her lap. Her hair had grayed since he left, and lines of age flowed along her forehead, under her eyes. "I want you to know that. I love you."

She'd been hinting at this kind of thing all week. It was driving Danny crazy. "Mom, I'll be fine. Really." He sat up from his stretched-out pose on the couch. "I was the best pilot they had in training, and I know more about the jets than just about anybody else who's ever flown one. I'll be back in a year or two and it'll be like I never left."

Maddie wrung her hands, folded in her lap. She looked so upset and fearful, trying to find words for unspeakable things. She couldn't say that she'd lost him once already, not without pushing her son completely from her reach. "I wish you wouldn't go."

"Well I kind of have to at this point." Not that Danny would have turned the job down if he could have. He couldn't wait until this whole family mess was over.

Much of the visit was indeed gloom and doom, and certainly elements of that lurked beneath every kind wish and gesture, but his parents did their best to show him a good time, and Danny, for his part, tried to play along with it. They took him to the movies, a place he hadn't been in almost six months. It was a stupid comedy, and all three of them laughed too hard at the jokes, eating popcorn like the salted crunchy stuff was endangered. They tried the amusement park, which was a dumb idea from the start because all three of them were adults, and the atmosphere brought his parents back to the days when Danny was a kid. The roller coasters gave all of them the creeps, for one reason or another, and the park visit was messily and awkwardly truncated shortly after their arrival. Jazz showed up three days before Danny's departure, and she was furious when she found out the state of things.

Danny had been staying in his old room. He was reading a manual and listening to some music when his door crashed in. That was his first clue that Jazz was home.

"You," she seethed. Her red hair bristled, almost on fire, and her formal work suit gave her the air of an angry judge. Jazz had grown taller and filled out over the years, but her confidence and—Danny thought—arrogance had grown with her education. "What do you think you're doing?"

Danny pulled off his headphones, clicking off the rock music. "Waiting."

"For what?"

He shrugged. "To leave. This place is dead."

"It's dead because you killed it." Jazz pushed the door shut so the parents couldn't hear. She flicked on the overhead light, since Danny had been using only the desk lamp. "I thought you had changed. You were supposed to be this big-shot star at the camp. Why can't you entertain your own parents, who don't think they're ever even going to see you again?"

"Jazz," Danny said, fighting his own rising anger. "That's just… wrong. They are going to see me again. They're just being paranoid parents."

"Wrong. They're worried you're going to die." The last word hung off her tongue like a drop of poison. "They think you're going to die again, for good, and they don't want it to happen."

"Now what do you mean 'die again'?" Danny rose out of his chair. "Tell me about that. What am I supposed to be doing for my failure parents?"

"Being sincere would be a good start."

Danny blinked. "Really. Oh, really. Sincere? Is that some kind of canned answer they taught you at Harvard?" He stopped and caught his breath, lowering his voice. "Jazz, if this is all you have to say then why don't you get out of here."

Jazz ground her teeth, resting her lowered head on her knuckles. "Danny, I don't want to fight with you." Her voice came muffled from between her arms. "I just don't want our family to be a wreck. And I hate to say it, I really do, but you're the one who's wreaked." She dropped her arms. Danny felt mildly sickened, and a little indignant, to see the shine of tears in her eyes.

"I… didn't make it that way. It happened. Mom and Dad screwed around with too many things they couldn't control, and it happened." He scraped for more. "You, you're looking for someone to blame, and you pick me because I'm the one in the army." Military, he corrected himself. "You've always been… thought I was…" Danny wanted to say Jazz had persecuted him, criticized him since day one, but that wasn't right and both of them knew it.

Jazz swiped roughly at her eyes. Her lips parted for air, and she looked at the floor. "Can you answer one thing for me? Then, I promise you, I will not make any more trouble."

"Shoot." Danny put a finger on the play button of his radio.

"What happened to you when the house collapsed?"

Danny clicked on his music. "I don't know what you're talking about."

XXX

His send-off at the airport mirrored the hideous misery of the entire visit; it was awkward, tearful, and nauseatingly melodramatic. His mother cried. His father spoke bravely, but his voice wavered in a miasma of hope and pessimism. It was Jazz whom Danny remembered as the flight attendants moved up and down the aisles, running one last check before take-off. Jazz hadn't said much at all. She had leaned in and squeezed him in a hug, her arms tight across his back. She pulled away and looked him square in the eye.

"Don't screw up."

Danny adjusted his legs in the cramped space in front of him. All things considered, that was the most positive piece of advice he'd gotten over that entire lamentable week. At least she had decided not to hate him. He'd miss Jazz, but she'd do well in life. His parents had hinted that she was seeing somebody—well, good for her. Psychiatrists made insane amounts of money, so she would have no financial worries. All things considered, the future of his family was safe and secure, and it would continue that way, even if he never came back.

XXX

The day he shipped out, Danny made an astonishing, gratifying, amazing and astounding discovery: aircraft carriers are BIG. Bigger than anything. City-big. Big and busy and gloriously full of duty and responsibility and fun things like engines and levers and doors that had twirling metal wheelie-locks on them, and when you sat down or laid down, you always felt the very faint rumble of the nuclear engines deep in the ship's dark, wet-smelling bowels. The first thing everybody learned about aircraft carriers was this: no touching, and no wandering. Big, expensive, out-of-this-wordly cool military ships _were_ _not toys_. All the pilots nodded solemnly at the instructing officer, all the while doing cart-wheeling tap-dances in their minds.

Danny got his own room, just as efficiently designed as that back at training camp, and in the days that followed he ate in one of several different crowded noisy mess-halls, relishing the fact that he was not behind the service counter, and ran drills drills and more drills regarding the launching, maintenance, and landing of the planes. They had taught this in training, but here there was a big difference. The big difference was, naturally, that now they could physically practice launching military jets off the insanely large aircraft carrier. They could, and they did, and later in mess hall, everybody agreed with a socially acceptable level of jaded ambivalence that it was, without a doubt, right up there with the most record-breakingly awesome things ever done by anybody.

This, as Danny discovered, was because any sane person being launched toward the endless depthless ocean at upwards of a hundred miles an hour is liable to think that life as they have known it is ending. The first time Danny had done it, they made him report his fuel and line up his jet, then he took off. The jet shook under him, the acceleration mashed him back into the seat, and he held his breath in the breathing mask as two horizontal stripes of blue crashed toward him as the runway ended and then he was in the air, the horizon sinking from sight as the jet shot up, and the people on the radio asking how he'd done.

"Fine," Danny replied. "Take-off successful." He wanted to do it again.

They let him buzz around a little bit, making passes over the ship and generally exploring the air over the sea before calling him down. If there was one thing more stimulating than take-off, it was landing, landing on an insanely big ship that turned out to be insanely small once you looked at it from the air and thought about landing your supersonically speeding jet on it. Naturally, that was only an initial impression. Once Danny brought the jet around, remembering every word of his training to do so, and he touched its bouncing rubber wheel to the thick white stripe on the carrier's runway. The control tower and various personnel shot past him, giving Danny a scare before the arrestor cables caught the jet and safely stopped it. Everything went off without a hitch.

Those manning the arrestor cables smiled as Danny peeled himself off the pilot's seat and jumped off the jet. "First time?"

Danny shook his head clear, breath whistling between his lips. "Oh yeah."

XXX

Any aircraft carrier of the supercarrier class weighed over seventy-five thousand tons, and in all the world there were only twelve of them. They had angled flight decks for easier take-off and landing. Planes launched with the help of steam-powered catapults and landed with the assistance of arrestor cables, wires laid across the runway to be caught by the landing jet's tailhook. They hosted many more planes than the smaller carriers, the escort and light aircraft carriers, and their flight decks were built larger to reduce the risk of an accident, allowing the pilot of a damaged, wobbling jet a much better chance at surviving his landing. Their populations typically ranged from five to six thousand.

The new supercarriers surpassed this. Nuclear powered and built for stealth, they carried more planes and required less personnel than the older models. Electromagnets had replaced steam in the catapults, and modifications to the cables strengthened and reinforced their effectiveness in landing. Of this newer kind there were only three operational, and the _USS Washington_ was one of them.

The _USS Washington _weighed ninety thousand tons. It carried over one hundred of the U.S.A.'s best jets, bombers, and cargo craft, housing just under five thousand military personnel. The _Washington _was one of the three most advanced supercarriers in the world, and the United States owned all of them. The world's oceans floated only twelve supercarriers of any make, and of those, the United States owned seven. Four older models, plus the three stealth types.

China kept an old Russian supercarrier that had been in the shop since the nineteen forties. A popular joke aboard the _Washington_ was that the Chinese would be fighting with torpedo-strapped fish. The new recruits laughed. The veterans didn't.

XXX

To have been chosen for the _Washington_ Danny was only a little more than lucky. As part of the very small new recruit population on board, he had been chosen for his skill and eccentric mechanical knowledge. None of his fellows back at the camp had followed him here; they had been assigned to smaller, less agile carriers. So when Danny was told to jump, he jumped.

His euphoria over being on the carrier lasted all of a week. The ship was big, yes. It was amazing and high-tech, yes. But it was not roomy. Two people going opposite directions in the hallway had to flatten themselves against the ship's cold metal walls to pass each other, and the living quarters were nothing spacious. As an officer and a pilot, Danny was allowed his own room, but others slept in massive sardine-can rooms filled floor-to-ceiling with bunks. The decks were dangerous, and an enlisted crew member could spend weeks without seeing the sky. Few complained, as complaints overheard by superiors could land a person in mess duty faster than the catapults could snap. Hours were irregular, and a person could be called to duty any time. And when they called, you came. Such was the case one Tuesday at three in the morning.

Danny slapped off his buzzing alarm and rolled out of bed, punching his light on and stumbling to the rack for some clothes. Pajamas came off and a pair of black slacks went on, along with an informal work shirt and his heavy black pilots' boots. He was supposed to be in the hangar below decks for an inspection of his jet. Every pilot had to do it; it was only a question of when. Somehow all the new recruits ended up with the miserably early morning hours, while the veterans enjoyed inspection times that ran from afternoon to early evening. Danny ran a hand through his hair, smoothing it, and glanced at himself in the small mirror above his dresser. A little dark under the eyes, but otherwise alright. He pushed open the door and started through the ship, his boots thumping on the thin, rough brown carpet. These weren't even official inspections. A handful of grease monkeys hooked the ship up to a truckload of sensors and checked its pulse and glanced in his ears, hardly ever finding anything wrong. It walked the line between mindless and precautionary, the kind of process pilots loved to hate.

Hart appeared around a corner in the hallway. Danny knew him from lunch and flight practice. He'd been in the service about five years and had an excellent sense of humor. They exchanged wry smiles as he and Danny angled their bodies to pass in the narrow hallway. Hart had put an excellent little twist on the inspections for Danny several days ago.

"So, y'know, most guys," Hart had started, raising his voice over the clatter in the mess hall. He had his thin elbows on the table, a turkey sandwich dangling from one hand. "They go to a bar or something and they complain about their boss, or their paperwork, or their taxes…" Hart paused, wiping tomato juice from his lips with his other hand. The other guys at the table had already begun to snicker. "Am I right? I mean, what do we complain about? What do we get to tell chicks in bars?" He leaned back, imitating a relaxed pose on a barstool, conversing with an imaginary looker at his side. "Mmmmyeeaah, I was up all night inspecting the hardware on my GX-2000 Air Force jet. Just a little look-over before launch next day. Do it all the time."

Danny had to admit, it was an appealing comparison, and it really took the sting out of the job. He climbed several flights of staircases, arriving at the hangars. After the tight hallways, the wide-open warehouse of the jets was a relief. Lights shone down from above, casting the metal hulls in gray shadow, and a wind brushed the open bay doors. A hundred people bustled among the jets, clothed in the white mechanic's coveralls. Danny spotted his own post and strode over.

"Any problems yet?"

Baker came out from under a wing, his hair blonde and lightly spiked and his eyes masked in yellow goggles. "Looks good so far. You need to get in there and give us a fuel reading." Danny hopped into the cockpit and fired up the electronics, reading off the fuel level to Baker down below, who chewed a pencil between his teeth as he tapped in the data to a small black laptop. "Kay. Looks good, looks good." He had Danny check several other things, testing the engines and the missiles in the belly of the jet, all of them coming out clear. Fifteen minutes later, Danny's job was over with time to spare. He only had to wait a couple more minutes for the mechanic to give the all-clear, then he could go back to his room.

In the meantime, he ambled over to the bay doors and squinted into the salty cold of the wind. The jet lift blocked much of his view, but around its square shape he glimpsed blackness, peppered with a handful of shining stars.

"Hey." Baker had sneaked up on him, following Danny's gaze. "You want to go up?"

"Up, you mean on the flight deck?" The deck must be nearly empty at this hour, and Danny had always gone up with at least a dozen other people.

Baker grinned. "Why not? I should check the cable clasps up there anyway. Come on with me." He ducked under the wing and weaved his way past fellow mechanics to a cramped stairwell in the side wall, mounted the clanking staircase, and turned a door open onto the wide expanse of the brightly lit flight deck. Baker gave Danny five minutes max, and pointed out his own station at a shed-like protrusion near the control tower. "I'll get you when I'm finished. If anybody asks, you're helping Baker with the jumpers."

"Got it."

With a final snide grin Baker turned to his business at the shed, his grimy white coveralls shifting under the lights of the control tower. Danny turned his attention to the deck, a vast gray surface of polymer, its surface slightly tilted to let the planes land more easily. An iron railing lined its edge, marking the line between the safety of the busy ship and the death of the frigid Pacific, a sixty foot drop from one to the other, and an easy one from the tearing wind and slanting surface of the deck. Danny walked out, taking care with his balance, and leaned against the rail, its cold bar pressing his arms, the chill wind biting into his skin. The ocean stretched out in rippling shadows under the ethereal starlight, and Danny wondered who had first seen it dark like this, the horizon clear of land and city light with only the stars above for company. The celestial lights were out in force tonight. Those constellations familiar to Danny, the Big Dipper, Orion, and Draco, he couldn't find any of them in the bright abundance above him. The shining points speckled the sky like salt, sparkling grains against a sheet of black, forming the powdered band of the Milky Way and dispersing independently around it.

The wind needled more insistently, the salt-smelling air growing icy on Danny's bare arms. He closed his eyes and felt the ship growling in its hulls, the freeze of the iron pressing his arms. He let the wind blow and relaxed into it, silently surrendering, and its chill ceased to bother him. Danny raised his eyes to the star-spangled night above him.

"Hey!" Baker shouted and grabbed Danny's shoulder. "I said you could look around, not toss yourself overboard."

"I wouldn't have been tossed." Baker rolled his eyes and shoved him back towards the stairwell. "I was just looking."

"You're lucky the wrong guys weren't looking or it would have been trouble for both of us." Baker slammed open the door and shooed Danny inside. The sudden heat of the stairwell brought goosebumps to his arms. Behind him, the mechanic pulled the door shut, eliminating the last traces of the wind and the sky. "For an officer, you don't have much common sense."

XXX

"Because Taiwan," Uden Dirk groaned, heaving the barbell onto the rack. "Is five miles from China. They don't need aircraft carriers because they've got a base in the island's backyard." He sat up from the bench and wiped his hands together, having finished his bench presses for the day. Metal clinked and clamored in the weight room as others worked out on the various weight machines. Taylor Caiman and Danny Fenton sat on a parallel weight bench. Dirk glared and the two of them and shook his head. "New recruits."

"Hey, we're both pretty good and you know it." Caiman brushed his shock of blonde hair. "Best of the noobs, if that's what you want to call us."

He looked to Danny for agreement, but his fellow pilot wouldn't rise to it. Unlike Caiman, Danny's ego had never outgrown his talent, and he was willing to acknowledge his desire for the older man's opinion. "Okay, so what's the story according to you? I agree that they have the home field advantage, but a serious war seems… distant." Danny had been on the carrier for several months, and throughout that time the pilots had been training and preparing, enduring constant drills and exercises which all anticipated war. He didn't know the typical routine, but the commanding officers were taking their work very seriously. That could be expected in the military, but an odd string of tension ran through the work that just didn't feel right.

"I think we've got too many like your buddy Caiman," Dirk sighed. "Everybody thinks that the United States is invincible, and this decade has been a series of reminders that we're not. China's been lurking around for too long, and they've had it with us. That's what I think. They've been picking this fight for a long time now."

"True enough," Caiman agreed. "But we're still the world power, and we've got Europe backing us this time."

Dirk rolled his eyes. "Like that means a lot. Europe is backing us, but none of those Old Worlders are going to interfere unless they see that it's necessary. Unless the U.S. gets its butt kicked. They figure that won't happen, so they'll throw a couple guys our way, but I doubt anybody else will bother to get really involved."

"I don't know. China's a pretty big deal." Danny scratched his arm. "They aren't exactly the Middle East. If something serious breaks out, it could easily involve others."

Caiman punched his arm. "Aw, you're no fun."

"You're both untrained nitwits." Dirk stood up. "I've got duty. See you later."

XXX

The sun rose on the Atlantic. It shimmered as polished gold across the water, rising on the East Coast, washing away night's somber tones of blue and gray, rinsing them in white light that let the reds and yellows glimmer. A hundred thousand birds chirped across North America as the first beams struck the Washington Monument, cascading over the Appalachians, flowing past Mount Rushmore into the grasslands of the Midwest, flashing gold against its dry grasses and rich farmlands, the dew on the leaves evaporating as the light brightened and warmed the dark earth beneath. As the hours passed the light danced across the land and vaulted into the Pacific, beginning its long journey to Asia over the chilled and choppy waters.

It touched on the _USS Washington_ and the _USS_ _Nevada_, the _Langley _and the _Lexington_, it touched on an island off the coast of China, and as the first bright rays touched on its high mountains, a city on Taiwan's west coast exploded in a flower of bright orange, mortal gray, and the starving flame of scarlet.

XXX

Caiman banged on Danny's door and shouted the news. Danny bolted to the door and threw it open wide, but by that time Caiman had long since vanished. Danny stood, looking at nothing and seeing too much. Flight manuals mechanics instructions the thin flame of an acetylene torch and the grand roar it made as one applied it to metal. Ships of gray and white and pure pitch black flashed past, he thought of much but considered very little. He skipped over things. Academics stuck faster than the social, but of all things he remembered his parents. Danny saw that Caiman had gone and that he was alone, and he saw the faces of his parents, and something else behind them.

Danny clenched his teeth and slammed his door shut, the echo banging in his room and the hall outside.

So, he would fight. Danny fisted his hands at his sides, imagining the sticky rubber of a jet's control sticks between them, forcing out the static of family. He could and would fight well. The war didn't change a thing for him. Simply, it meant that he would finally have a chance to fight.

XXX

When the first alarm came it was dark and raining hard outside. Red lights flashed as Danny thudded through the narrow halls, jamming himself between two others at times to squeeze past, trying desperately for the main hangar. He scrolled through a list of things he had been told and taught, the special flight procedures for aircraft carrier takeoff, the need for the grease monkeys to get his fuel readings, his order in the lineup of pilots to be launched. He could have recited all of it in his sleep, but sleep and combat were two very different states of mind.

As Danny pushed his way through the halls, it surprised him how little anybody else thought of warnings. Nobody panicked or looked about to crack. They were soldiers, and they had been trained to do their duties well. His own ambition aside, it did make Danny proud to be a part of such an efficient machine, all five thousand people, being exactly where they needed to be exactly when they needed to be there. He couldn't wait for the sky. Let the Reds come.

Danny reached the cold and noisy hanger, and in spite of the room's huge size it seemed packed to capacity. The crowded conditions belied urgency rather than chaos. Rain pattered down through the holes used by the lifts to get the jets to the runway, and the air filled with the hissing of hydraulics and the sharp orders of mechanics and officers. A dank, metallic-scented warmth hung over all the activity over the place, and pipes steamed and hissed along the walls. Danny weaved among the people and hardware toward his own jet, thankful for the traction of his heavy boots on the floor, slimy with oil residue and rainwater. All around him other mechanics inspected planes, declared them good, and boosted them onto the deck where they took to the sky. Becker spotted him in an instant.

"Danny! Good. Your jet is all set, and we've got your readings, so go ahead and jump in." Becker glanced at the clipboard in his hand, its pages wrinkled by humidity, then squinted back up at Danny. "Good luck!"

Danny hefted himself into the cockpit and slammed the hatch. The echoing thunder of shouts and clanking machinery softened and muffled, reduced to a dull roar inside the cockpit. Danny adjusted himself and buckled in, snapping the face mask to his helmet and checking the electronics, making sure everything was perfect, in top operating condition. Everything looked good. He patted down his jacket, checking for all the standard gear. Was he forgetting anything?

_"The designers have it down so that the engine adjusts itself to operate at maximum efficiency for progressively higher altitudes, and a half-open twist makes it chafe."_ Of course, good ole' Zeev. Communication and obedience were paramount, and if Danny misused either he'd get himself killed. The cockpit jerked as the lift began hefting his to the top deck. He rose above the busy frenzy of the hangar and into the soupy atmosphere of the outside. Danny would remember the old man's advice.

Static crackled in his headset, followed by the voice of one of several men in the _Washington_'s control room. "Echo six, are you reading?"

Danny checked his engines one last time. "Reading you loud and clear and ready to go, Echo Base."

"We have you cleared for takeoff. Go ahead."

"Acknowledged."

Danny made the engines roar. The plane shot forward into the darkness and took flight, the hard drops of rain smacking and racing off his window, the tumbling wind shaking the craft just enough to make him nervous. Danny scowled at the bad weather and checked his radar. The other pilots circled, waiting for their fellows. The actual battle would happen miles away, keeping the _Washington_ from unnecessary danger. Danny waited and circled with the rest of them, feeling very much like a tiger in a cage.

At last everybody was in position. They aligned in formation, a triangular fighting pattern, and took off across the ocean. The radar buzzed with reports and the talk of the other pilots, but Danny kept his attention on his jet. He would have no screw-ups, because he was dealing with his life and he didn't take that lightly. Practice and duty, the one thing they had never taught him was how different those things were. Practice had been drills and imaginary enemies, but reality was the worm in your stomach and the adrenaline in your veins, sharpening the senses, anticipating the strike. Danny reminded himself once again of Zeev. No. Heroics.

A warning came through from command before anybody saw anything. Danny looked at his radar and saw nothing, seeing the same in the thick darkness out his rain-spattered window. He altered his course with the others, and after only a couple seconds a strange blip showed up on radar, then two more. Five more, and a squadron. The radio heated with barked commands and shouted observations of strategy, and Danny dived with his section as they met the oncoming enemy, invisible to the eye in this night. This would be a battle of the radars, but Danny was comfortable with that. The stakes had been raised for both parties, and Danny gripped his controls like they were the hands of a savior.

The order came. "Echo group, break formation and destroy enemy targets!" Danny peeled off with the others, the neat triangular formation disintegrating into its parts at the order. They were matched evenly with the enemy, but Danny would have preferred a majority.

"Echo Six! You've got a tail."

"Roger that." Danny spotted the Chinese jet on radar and slammed the controls down, making the plane dive almost to the water before pulling it into an upward curve, all the while tracking the dot behind his dot on the radar screen, trying to plot a course through the chaos above him. Something exploded in the darkness overhead, but Danny was out from under it before he could see what had happened.

"Echo Base, Echo Four is down! I repeat—" Danny clenched his teeth, tuning out of the rest of it. He had his own problem, a problem which had begun to get dangerously close, and he had to keep on his toes if he didn't want to be the next casualty. Bolts of fire, gunfire, shot past his window. Once that guy got a lock, it would be rockets instead of bullets.

"Echo Six requesting immediate assistance," Danny said, louder than he'd meant to.

"Echo Seven here Danny why can't you do anything right?"

Danny pursued his lips at Caiman's taunt, throwing his plane in rollercoaster curves as his tail tried for a better angle. "Echo Seven, can the chatter and give me a hand."

"Sure thing." Somebody zoomed down farther back and started shooting the harassing jet, forcing it to drop the chase and allowing Danny to escape. Caiman laughed in the radio. "There we go."

Danny didn't worry about a response to that. Instead, he looked for and immediately spotted a target of his own. A plane down low, close to the ocean, heading away from the fight. Danny narrowed his eyes and dipped down, dropped back a bit, and slunk after the low craft, blending with the waves as his enemy did. He got the enemy jet in his sights and squeezed down on the gun triggers, carefully, slowly. As the bullets shot forward, the enemy jet shot up. Danny grimaced and followed after, laying on the heat, blasting up into the sky in pursuit of his target, dodging both foes and fellows with the help of the radar screen. His prey kept weaving, keeping just out of lock. Danny had to hurry, or it would call for backup just as he himself had done. Danny tensed, taking in everything about the controls, the noise of the engine, the barely audible prattle of the gunfire. He let the twitch of his hands guide the controls, moving naturally, dodging and weaving impeccably.

The missile sight locked. "Echo Six, Rex Two!" Danny announced to the others, punching a button and dropping a rocket. The sharp point streaked forward into the air, directly toward the enemy jet, which turned on a dime and sped away in a panic. The rocket struck. The plane exploded. Danny smirked, his humor inverted the next moment by a single rap of gunfire on his ship. He'd caught another tail.

Danny sighed slowly as he began evasive maneuvers once more, letting the breath catch between his teeth and the tension flow from his body. He took in the controls and the radar, the tremors of his jet and the wet darkness beyond his cockpit, factoring as much of it as he could into every move he made. His jet skirt the waves, sliding between swells, and he kept his breath in sighs, feeling the jet move as if it was a third limb. The enemy craft pulled up and away, and Danny gunned his jet upwards, picking a new target, answering a fellow's call for help.

The enemy had arrived in force. Danny fought like a wounded animal as did many others, but slowly, the balance of power shifted. Slowly, they began to los jets faster than the enemy, to everybody's suppressed astonishment. Jet after jet blew, one American, two Chinese, three American, one Chinese. Orders over the radio became purposefully calmer and more demanding, but the crime of underestimation had already been committed. The dark day turned darker, and the pilots fought for their lives. But nobody could touch Danny.

More than one of Danny's own Echo Group had spotted him weaving ahead of one or two pursuants, but none of them could take him down. The sky buzzed with enemy craft, and the battle went slowly and painfully, but where Danny became was involved thing worked out like a charm. It puzzled Caiman, who continued to check on him every so often. For a closer look at the guy, and to raise his own chances of survival, Caiman got Danny on the radio and talked him into a team-up. With the right skills and a truckload of luck, Caiman believed that this costly battle could yet be won. He came into line behind and to the side of Danny, each running clean-up for the other. When Caiman was chased Danny would circle around and pick them off, and Caiman did the same when Danny caught a bogey.

"I'd high-five you if I could reach you man," Caiman chuckled. "We'll send these guys packing yet."

"Hunh," Danny replied. Caiman wondered what that meant and glanced over at his partner.

"Echo Group, hang in there. The _USS Nevada _is on its way."

"Oh goody." Caiman glanced at the radar. He'd entered a quiet spot in the fight, meaning they had about four seconds of free time, so Caiman took a closer look at Danny's ship, checking for damage. Cockpit area looked fine, as did the smooth metal of the wings, but… He blinked, dragged a hand over his eyes and looked again, but he hadn't been mistaken. Caiman transferred to a private frequency. "Echo Base, come in." He wondered what they'd say. They might call him crazy, or maybe they'd simply explain that Dee was using a different kind of fuel.

"Go ahead Echo Seven." The background was quiet. He was talking to a single person now. "We read you."

"Ah, crap…" He and Dee had company. "Echo Six is burning green. I repeat, Echo Six is burning green."

When Caiman had looked out his window, he'd seen emerald jets streaming from Fenton's engines. Jet fuel burned orange, or pure blue when it was really hot, but never had Caiman seen, in picture or practice, a jet that burned green.

"Please explain, Echo Seven, we're listening."

"Negative Echo Base. Six and I have engaged, and I need the public frequency."

"Acknowledged. Keep your information quiet. You will be debriefed upon your return."

XXX

Back in the control room, an astonished communications officer yanked off his headphones and set several documents to print. Beside him, others spoke authoritatively into their headsets, commanding the pilots and organizing the attack, relaying the orders given by Commander Reese, who walked behind them, overseeing the operation. The young officer glanced again at the array of computer screens and quickly channeled Caiman's private line to a trusted friend of his. He grabbed his printouts, scanned them, and jumped up to the commander.

Reese glanced his way. "What is it, Lyman?"

"Intelligence for the general, sir."

"Don't you think you had better let me see it?"

Lyman began to quote a code section, which specifically stated that valuable information must first be reported to the general. Reese stopped him before he could start. "Alright, go ahead. Get back here on the double." Lyman nodded and continued down the hall, climbing a short stair to arrive at the general's. After explaining the matter briefly to his assistant, they buzzed him in.

Inside, General Hardesty and several others stood over a table, its surface covered with a digital map of the Chinese coast and Taiwan. Marked were all U.S. and known enemy positions. "Yes?" Hardesty peered up at the communications officer. "What do you have?"

Lyman glanced at the others around the table, lesser colonels and lieutenants. "I have something you may want to see, General."

Hardesty nodded for the others to leave. They did, quietly and with little talk, shutting the door behind them, leaving Lyman alone with the general. His silver hair fell sternly around steel-grayed eyes that may once have been blue, and he stared evenly at Lyman. "This had better be very, very good."

"Right. It is, sir." Lyman had never had to do anything like this before. "I just received a report from Echo Seven that another pilot is experiencing trouble with his fuel output."

The general's mouth hardened into a line. "You know we can't send out for repairs." He turned away.

"Sir, Echo Seven said that the jet engines on Echo Six were releasing some kind of green exhaust." Hardesty paused, his back to Lyman. "I'm not privy to all matters of this type, sir, but communications is supposed to be aware of unusual situations like this. If Six is burning a new kind of fuel, we need to know—"

"Did you get any details about the type of green that it was? What else did Echo Seven say?" Lyman had his full attention, now. "Don't get this wrong, soldier."

"That's it. Caiman engaged an enemy, and he needed to return to the public frequency. Nobody else knows about this," Lyman added. "I have Echo Six's fuel readout here, and everything checks out. Apparently, it's just… green."

General Hardesty looked at his tactical board and the crafts spread out across it. He pinched the bridge of his nose, thinking, and looked up sternly. "Listen up. Nobody is to know about this. You face court martial if you disobey, and Echo Seven is to be sent to solitary for interrogation the moment he touches this ship. The same with Echo Six Is that clear?"

Lyman nodded curtly. "Crystal clear, sir."

"Call Six and Seven back to the ship as soon as you can afford to lose them. I'd have them back sooner if I was sure the Reds wouldn't follow." He paused, thoughtful. "Give me that." General Hardesty took the fuel report. "Dismissed."

XXX

"We got these guys by the nuts!" Caiman crowed, trying to get a response, any human response, out of Fenton. He didn't take the bait, and Caiman got worried. Echo Six was still trailing small green flames from its engines. "Hey Dee, everything okay over there?"

The response came curt, mechanical, and automatic. "Yes."

"Alright buddy, just checking." Caiman split off, chasing an enemy who'd locked onto Danny. He had a bad feeling about this. Caiman shot a glance at the radar as he followed his man, and a flurry of red dots appeared, converging on the scene of the battle.

Caiman swore frantically into the microphone. "They got reinforcements!" And loads of them. If the _Nevada _was going to send help, it had better send it quick. "Dee! We're going to have to split up."

"Acknowledged."

Acknowledged? That was an awful last word. Caiman split off, the flood of enemy jets giving him more than enough to think about, but still he worried about Danny Fenton and Echo Six. The guy never had been very lively, but this was weird, even for him.

XXX

Danny watched the Chinese jets race toward him on the radar. The omnipresent rain lashed harder with their arrival, and the ocean rose higher. That was the sight of fear, and intimidation. He was afraid, because he would die on a foreign sea in a blast of heat and fire that would incinerate his body before his nerves could register the pain. But if Danny thought like that, of course he would die. The trick, he thought, tongue extending slightly from his mouth, was to think like a jet, to feel the jet and touch the enemy. He couldn't command a hulk of metal alloy, but he might be able to move his own wings and fire his own guns, operating the controls on a more personal level.

He felt down into the plane, the fuel pumps, the missile bay, the ultra-sophisticated ailerons and their many integrated circuits. He called to mind the blueprints, filling in their empty places with imagined controls, gears, and chips. This was just like his old models, when it came right down to it, the models he flew as a kid, standing under a lazy afternoon sun with a black plastic controller in his hand, its spindly antenna weaving in a light breath of wind.

Danny imagined he really could feel the plane. On a metacognitive level he knew it must be an illusion, but the hard physical reality seemed different. He didn't see the radar with his eyes as much as he sensed it with his brain, manipulating a three-dimensional picture of the surrounding space within his mind. His veins pumped motor oil, and he exhaled the light exhaust of incinerated nitrogen. Danny moved his big jet as smoothly as a sparrow in the wind, seeing through the darkness, hitting his targets with incredible accuracy.

Gradually, it caught up with him. The enemy planes swarmed around him, boxing him in, and no matter how many tricks and rolls Danny tried, the enemy continued to close in, and no other friendly pilot could afford to help him. Danny struggled and strained and threw all his power into the effort, trying everything he could and neverminding how many gears he ground in his maneuvers, but still they closed. A red screen bleeped. "Missile Locked On." He saw a smaller shard of matter break off from one of those jets behind him, watched the shard grow closer, and with a jolting shock of ripping metal and exploding fuel tanks, Danny felt the missile hit.

XXX

"Echo Six is down!"

XXX

The cockpit ejected him into the thick darkness, throwing him up as the heat of his jet billowed upward. It was like being thrown into nothing. Danny lost all sense of direction as the pilot's seat shoved him up and out of the explosion; other jets shot past and around him close by and at a distance. The cockpit's seat reached the end of its acceleration, peaking near the clouds, and began to fall, pulling Danny down with it. He felt trapped, and if he could just get out of this millstone chair he thought he might fly, but that was impossible, he knew, because nobody could fly. The seat turned upside-down, pointing Danny's head at the water, and he knew then that even if he could fly, he would choose not to. At what he guessed was the right height, Danny pulled the parachute.

He hit the water and the heavy pilot's seat dragged him down. He tore himself free and struck for the surface, hardly sure of its direction so much did the ocean roil, but at the last moment he broke through and gasped a mouthful of air, salt-spray, and rain. Danny ripped off the remains of the parachute, struggling with the buckle, and let the whole mess droop down to the depths. He kicked off his boots and his heavy flight jacket, both of which tugged at him, adding more weight to the bundle he had to keep afloat. Danny kicked at the water, trying to ride the massive swells without somersaulting beneath the water, and when he thought he could spare the effort, he glanced up at the battle above. He could see some things, the flash of gunfire or, once in a while, the explosion of a craft, but the darkness allowed very little, and the rain shot hard in his eyes.

They would think he was dead. They would think he was dead, unless he… Danny reached in a compartment attacked to his belt and tugged out a small waterproof box. He entered a code on its keypad, activating his locator signal. Fighting with the other arm to keep above the frigid water, Danny replaced the box in its holder. Now, as soon as the weather cleared and the battle was either won or over, his people could find him. Danny figured that shouldn't take more than a week or two. The cold of the water dug into his skin like the claws of a lion.

What had gone wrong? Danny didn't think it was something he'd done, but maybe that didn't matter, because whatever had gone wrong, he would surely die because of it. Somehow, that didn't make any sense. He'd been doing alright in the jet, hadn't he? He'd been fighting better, much better, than any of the others… Danny hugged his chest and kicked his feet harder, his green Air Force shirt sticking to his chest, his pants feeling like tarpaulins around his legs. He didn't know… what had gone wrong…

That wasn't any way to think and he knew it. This couldn't be as bad as it looked. If he had a compass, he could at least try to drift toward the main fleet. But of course, he remembered, the compass had been in his jacket, which was now on its way to the bottom of the ocean. Danny glared up at the sky. None of the planes acknowledged him, and the rain kept coming down. The cold of the water and the darkness above were both oddly distant from him. None of this could be happening; it was impossible.

"If I could fix it…" he told the storm. He was having trouble speaking; the cold froze his throat, and his teeth chattered. "I'd fix it." Danny tightened his lips. "I would have fixed it!" he roared, throwing his fists at the water. "I would have killed them all." The salt water flowed in his mouth. Danny gagged and spat it out, the chill freezing his anger from him, reducing it to bitterness. A swell tumbled him underwater, and Danny clawed his way back up, gasping.

Time passed, Danny didn't know how long, and the cold dug into him. He lost feeling in his feet, and his fingers followed suit. The waves tossed him under, and each time it got harder to rise to the surface, but Danny did it, time after time after time, until the cold froze his legs, and then he used his arms. More of the water swept in his mouth, and Danny gagged as he swallowed more of it. But no matter what, he wasn't going to give up and sink. Danny had decided that first with himself. He didn't care about the creeping numb or the crashing swells, tumbling him time after time underwater, each plunge requiring more of his strength to survive. Danny fought all of it. He was going to break the surface until his best wasn't good enough.

And eventually, it wasn't.

XXX

"You listen to me. This is Admiral Thackary of the _USS Washington_."

"This is the _USS Nevada_. Go ahead, Admiral, and we'd like to congratulate you on your victory. That was some fine work out there."

"First of all it was a team effort, second of all we won by the skin of the skin of our teeth, and third of all that's not important right now. We lost a pilot whose well-being is a matter of international consequence, and we've picked up a signal from his tracker. We're sending out a small scout ship to retrieve him, and we'd like one of yours to help out."

"Roger that."

"Thanks."

"…It's been almost three days. He's dead for sure by now."

"Yes. We know."

XXX

Chief Medical Officer Petrury threw a small kit of supplies to the men on board the speed boat and climbed the ladder down to them. He worked under General Hardesty and he hated missions like these. "All right boys," he told the others on the boat. "Let's go get that corpse."

One of them laughed. The other three kept their filthy mouths shut. Petrury slicked back his hair and ducked beneath the wind shield as the boat sallied forth into the ocean, bumping along the small swells under the noonday sun, leaving the hulking shape of the _Washington_ far behind. Petrury didn't know why they had to do this. A whole disgusting war for them to worry about, and they had to go disturb the peace of some unlucky pilot. They'd probably reach his signal and discover the transmitter attached to a floating shard of the man's jet. He must be a senator's son, or some such thing. Petrury couldn't believe the pull some senators carried. Two of the fleet's best aircraft carriers on a mission to fetch out one miserable dead man.

But of course it wasn't Petrury's place to question orders, no sir. His job was to heal people and follow orders, so here he was, fetching the corpse of a senator's son under a healthy afternoon sun. Some days, he really loved his job. This was not one of those days.

One of the men announced that they'd reached the source, or gotten as close as they could to it, anyway. Farther off, Petrury could see the _Nevada_'s scout ship. "Can't you get a smaller signal range?"

"Sorry sir. The water is interfering. We're lucky to have this accuracy."

"Super," muttered Petrury. "Let's get started, then. I'd like to get back to the ship in time for dinner, if that's okay with you people." He didn't usually nag the underlings, but this was such a rotten job. And on a clear-blue sky like this, too. The body, assuming anybody could find it, would stink like a septic tank full of spoiled meat, and the reports had said this guy was young, just twenty-six years old, a blasted kid. He scanned the ocean with the other three, looking for the odd bob of fabric on the waves. He'd be astonished if they found anything. Water-logged bodies eventually sank.

"I think we've got something, sir."

Petrury started. "Alright soldier, let's see it." He looked over where they were pointing. A wrinkled green lump floated about ten yards away, about the length of a man, and unmoving. Petrury turned away. Just a kid. "What are you all waiting for?" he shouted. "Go get the poor slob!" They turned the boat around and came along side the thing. Petrury waited as they hooked it with a scoop hauled the thing on board. The bedraggled lump hit the deck with a morbid thud.

Grumbling to himself, Petrury bent for a closer look, bracing himself in anticipation of the smell. Strangely enough, there was no smell. The body hadn't decayed in the slightest. "Turn him over." Petrury snatched a paper from his jacket, comparing the picture with the face of the limp body on his deck. In the picture the kid had thick black hair, a stern, angular bone structure, and sharp blue eyes. He wore his uniform, and he looked as serious as any other military man.

The man on the deck lay on his side, his arms flopped up and to the side where they had fallen, legs tangled awkwardly at the deck. His hair was wet, and face hung expressionless, eyes closed. Nothing had decayed. He hadn't swollen, as every drowning man did, and if he smelled, it was only of the salt water still dripping off his clothes. If anything, he looked badly drunk, but certainly not dead.

"Apparently he just jumped in for a swim." The humor fell flat, and Petrury's companions remained purposefully silent, unwilling to issue an opinion one way or the other on the subject. Petrury glared at them. "Are you sure this is our man?" One of them reached for the man's neck, inspecting the nickel plates, the dog tags, which identified the bodies of dead soldiers.

"This is him." Another reached in a case on the dead man's belt and pulled out a blinking black box. "And here's the transmitter."

"Well then, call HQ. Tell them we found their body." Petrury kicked away the body bag and pulled his medical kit from under the seat, selecting a thin flashlight. He bent over the body and inspected the face more carefully, searching for a sign of normality, but he found none. Even the fish had left this one alone. It was a modern miracle, and if they let him talk about it, which Petrury didn't suppose they would, it would make him famous. He crouched down with the light and lifted the drunk or dead man's eyelid. The pupil was dilated, and the iris was iridescent green.

XXX

Danny woke up with the world's nastiest taste in his mouth. He squinted at the blast of light and tried to shade his eyes with a hand, but he couldn't move his hands, for whatever weird reason.

"If I hadn't seen it myself I wouldn't believe it." A wrinkled, slightly overweight man in a white coat leaned over him. "You, Mr. Fenton, are one lucky guy." He turned to a blurry shape at his side, possibly a nurse. Or a huge powdered-sugar-covered doughnut. Danny was really hungry. It took him a moment longer for the whole 'should be dead' thing to sink in.

"WHOA!" He jolted, trying to escape the bed, but the straps on his arms, torso, and legs held him tight. "What HAPPENED? Am I okay? Did we win? I mean…" He paused as the memory of the fight returned in force, him crashing and being in the ocean, but after a certain point, he couldn't remember a thing. Danny fought with the memory but returned nothing that made any real sense to him. He settled back on the cot, releasing a gale-force sigh of exasperation. "Can I get some food here?"

"Henry, make a note that his pupils are now blue…"

Nurse-boy, now known to Danny as the Henry, grinned cheerily as he scribbled on a clipboard. "…pupils… now… blue…" The pen scratched on the paper. The noise made Danny insane with irritation.

"Come on, I mean, I'd settle for oatmeal at this point. With brown sugar. And raisins. Cream would be great…" Danny would have been drooling if he wasn't totally and completely out of that particular substance. He shouldn't be talking this much, but his head felt light, and he could hardly help it. "And water! A big old cup of icy… wait, no. Make that warm water. Or coffee. I'd settle for tea…" God was he ever happy not to be dead. Danny had a vague feeling that there was something horrible he should be concerned about, but until he was forced to remember what it was, he was going to fantasize about oatmeal.

"Henry, shut the man up and get him some decent food," the doctor snapped.

"Right away." Danny rejoiced as Henry zipped away down a corridor.

"Hi," he told the doctor. "I thought I was supposed to be dead."

"Yeah," said the doctor. "Me too."

Danny laughed, and his gloriously undead-chest shook with the action. "I," he announced quietly. "Am a very happy camper. Thanks, for whatever it was you did."

The doctor smiled and shook his head, keeping his attention on a clipboard. "Let me tell you, I didn't do much."

XXX

"Petrury!" barked General Hardesty. "How in all of holy hell is that man still alive?"

In the general's office, Hardesty sat glaring at his medical officer and friend, but this wasn't a friendly meeting, as Petrury well knew. Hardesty had something against Daniel Fenton, Miracle Boy, but he could hardly imagine what it was. "I have no earthly idea, General. I gave him a little juice from the defibrillators, just for kicks, and he started right up."

"You talk like he's a car," Hardesty grumbled.

"I am sorry I don't have a good answer for you, but the fact of the matter is that I fished this kid out of the water green-eyed, brought him back to life blue-eyed, and it's beyond me how any of it worked."

The general tented his fingers on his desk. "It may be beyond you, but do you think it's beyond him?"

Petrury knew Hardesty to be a little eccentric, but he was a good commander and a competent person. If he was asking a question that stupid, there must be a reason. "I'm not sure I know what you mean."

Hardesty stood from his chair and began to pace. "I mean," he said. "Has our Lazarus said anything about how he came back to life? Anything at all about that, or about his jet?" He glanced about the room, visibly disturbed.

"No sir. He just seemed happy to be alive."

General Hardesty chuckled. "Yes." He glanced at a picture on the wall, of a jet speeding on a runway. "Yes. I imagine he would. But you're sure he's said nothing? Nothing at all about his methods?"

Petrury shook his head. "Not a peep."

Hardesty frowned. "Bring him down to interrogation, then. He's fit for it, isn't he?"

Petrury laughed. "Sir, he's fit for an Olympic sprint."

That opinion didn't make Hardesty any happier. "Hurry up. I want him down there in five minutes."

Petrury nodded. "Understood. I'll have him ready for you." He rose to leave, more than a little disappointed with how the meeting had gone. The kid should be welcomed back, not shouted at. But then, orders were orders, and Hardesty was the general—a good one at that.

"Petrury."

The medical officer paused at the door. "Yes?"

Hardesty stopped pacing and pinned him with a look, hands in his pockets. "Nobody breathes a word of this to anyone. Not even a telegram to the parents. As far as everybody knows, Fenton is still dead."

Petrury supposed he should have expected something like this. "Yes sir."

XXX

Danny walked between two armed soldiers, both holding rifles and armed with pistols at their sides. Their gear clinked lightly as they walked down the otherwise empty hallway as they escorted him to interrogation. Danny, at a material disadvantage, wore only black slacks and a plain t-shirt, which the medical officer had given him before the two guards arrived. Things were going a little fast, from his point of view. The two soldiers had arrived just after he'd finished eating, and he'd started eating roughly ten minutes before they arrived. All in all, Danny guessed he couldn't have been conscious for more than a half hour, and for somebody who had been declared legally dead three days ago, he thought they were taking some extraordinary precautions with him.

They wouldn't tell him anything about his situation, either. Doctor Petrury had told him that he was under orders to keep mum, and as to the battle, Danny was told only that it had ended in victory. He asked about Caiman and the rest of Echo Group, but the escorting soldiers merely grunted for him to follow them. And here he was now, walking along the narrow hallways, being treated like a prisoner of war at his own station. Who knew survival was a crime?

He arrived at a door, which the first soldier opened with a key. Inside there was a table and a barrel-chested man who was, apparently, the one who would be asking the questions. A mirror was set into the wall on the right, and Danny felt it was safe to assume that the mirror was two-way. He didn't speak as they pushed him in, and he sat down quietly at the table. His own issues could wait. Right now, he needed to worry about giving the right answers so he could get out of this and back to normal duty, assuming they would allow such a thing, which he doubted, as soon as possible.

The two soldiers left and locked the door behind them. A cursory glance at the building material showed no other exit. A bomb might go off and do little more than scratch the mirror in this iron box. The man across from Danny remained standing, his brow furrowed in a mix of thoughtfulness and blatant fury. The guy was a gorilla, and had his beefy arms crossed across his chest. Danny was strong, but he was no bodybuilder. Baldy here wouldn't have a problem kicking his butt.

"If you answer right, you'll get out of here no problem. Answer wrong and you'll stand trial for life. Got it?" He had a voice like sandpaper in a wind tunnel.

Danny nodded, trying to be respectful without sucking up. "Got it."

"Give a full report of everything that happened, starting from the time you took off from the ship."

Danny proceeded with his account, starting with Baker and the fuel check, describing the engagement of the Chinese crafts, ending with his horrific crash. "I swear I don't know how I'm still alive. I thought I was dead. I don't remember anything between being in the water and waking up in sick bay." He didn't describe how he had moved with the ship. It was irrelevant, since the whole thing had surely been in his head, anyway.

"That's all?" The man's brown eyes pinned him. "Nothing else? Echo Seven reported green flames from your jets."

"I don't know how that happened. Baker gave me the same fuel as everybody else, and all my instruments read normally at the time."

"So you just magically get shot down, spend two and a half days in twenty-degree water, and come out looking like you've just taken a long nap. Is that it?" The interrogator put his hands on the table. "That's it?"

Danny met his eyes. "Yes sir. That is all."

The man grimaced and looked up and over Danny's shoulder. He had a radio in his ear. "Alright. General Hardesty will see you. I suggest you give him a better story than you gave me."

Several minutes later, Danny found himself facing another man in another room, this one in an office. He saluted the general, and Danny's two armed escorts slipped out. General Hardesty acknowledged him with a nod, his silver hair glinting in the fluorescent light above. "So you really don't think anything unusual happened?"

"No sir," Danny replied. He remained standing, keeping his posture in order. "If something unusual happened, I wasn't aware of it."

"I might believe you," muttered the general, seated at his desk. "Who are your parents?"

That was an odd question. "Madeline and Jack Fenton."

The general nodded. "And what did they do before they became a car mechanic and a college teacher?"

Danny licked his lip, taking a moment to prepare a phrase. "They engaged in… unusual branches of science, sir."

"Correct." The general smiled. "Ectoplasmic research, or 'ghosts.' Isn't that right?"

"Yes sir. That's right." Danny didn't like where this was going, and if that wasn't bad enough, he was starting to feel a little ill. Maybe it hadn't been such a good idea to eat so soon after being dead.

"You grew up in Amity Park where, for a certain time, there was some kind of unusual ghost vigilante. Called himself Danny Phantom. But." The general crossed his legs, picking a pen off his desk to wave it at Danny. "After a certain explosion at your house, all sightings of the ghost boy stopped." He quirked a tight smile. "Apparently several freshman were killed. Anything you want to add to that?"

Danny was feeling really nauseous now. He had trouble paying attention, and it was all he could do to hide his discomfort. He just wanted to go sleep somewhere until it passed. "Nothing to add."

"And now," continued General Hardesty. "Apparently you mysteriously have _green fuel _coming out of your jet." He chewed his lip. "So you can understand if I am a little concerned over this, especially since the military application of ectoplasm is a _top secret project_."

"My apologies, sir, I didn't know." Danny felt himself swaying, losing his balance. "May I sit?" The general waved to a chair across from the desk. Danny mumbled his thanks and took it.

The general rolled his eyes, tiring of the run-around. "Officer Fenton, what is your connection to the Amity ghost?"

"He's me," Danny grumbled. He'd broken out in a cold sweat, holding his head between his hands.

The general blinked. "What?"

"He's me and I'm him! It's this whole stupid thing that happened years and years ago… My parents had a broken device, a ghost portal or some dumb thing, and I messed with it and got… powers." He ran a hand over his head. "If my jet was turning green it's probably because I accidentally tapped into them during the battle, alright?"

"Watch your tone," snapped General Hardesty. "Why don't you use these powers more often? Why aren't you in the private sector?"

"I don't know. I got tired of it."

The general squinted at him from across the desk. "Listen here. People die, and that's just the way it goes. It's no reason to kill yourself."

"…don't know what you mean by that."

The general stood. "I'm not here to entertain your stupidity. I have a proposition for you, and you can either take me up on it or spend the rest of your unnatural life in jail. Understand?"

"Yessir," Danny was starting to feel a little better, but not by much.

"Have you ever thought about becoming an astronaut?"

Danny's head snapped up. "What?"

The general sat forward, looking right at him. "I'm going to tell you some things, and if you repeat them, I will personally rip your nuts off."

"I won't say a word."

"Good. Listen, several years ago the United States established an experimental base on Mars."

Danny's mouth dropped open. "Holy—!"

"Indeed. It's a small installation, only five rooms, but it's a base nonetheless and four people work and live in it."

Danny sat up, all trace of his sickness gone. "Why doesn't anybody know about it? What about the eight months it takes to get to Mars? How do they eat, or—"

Hardesty stopped him with a hand. "That's not your concern. What is your concern is that several days ago we lost contact with one of them, and we need a team of people to get up there and fix whatever went wrong before the public catches wind of it.

"This is insane. You're pulling my leg, sir. An operation like that would take millions."

"Billions," corrected Hardesty with a half-smile.

"Fine, billions, and then there's the matter of the, I mean…" he stuttered. "Isn't NASA dead? Who started this thing?"

"A group of people with too much money on their hands who think humanity needs to move out before Earth goes up like a Fourth of July firecracker." Hardesty glanced at a plaque on his wall, showing twenty or thirty men standing arm-in-arm. "That's a picture of the benefactors."

"But, why hasn't anybody…"

"Because nobody would believe it, and if this fails, then that's the final nail in the space program's coffin. I'm not going to philosophize to you, but there are those of us who think that the future is in space. With the new nuclear engines Taiwan created, we can finally go there. Those engines have enough power in them to take us clear to Jupiter."

Danny rubbed his temples. "Alright. Assuming that's all true, what do you want me to do?"

"I want to volunteer you for a team of people to go up and fix things. There would be three of you, and you'll be provided with ample equipment to solve any technical malfunction. You're a good choice because it's apparently extremely difficult to kill something like you, and you're pretty much the best pilot we have."

"There are other good pilots out there, and I'm definitely not invulnerable. I usually turn all the way human whenever I pass out. I don't know why this time was any different."

The general nodded slowly. "Granted. However, we have reason to believe that something up there is using ectotech. I'm not sure if your parents ever got this far, but we've discovered that ectoplasmic substances carry enormous power. There are theories that, on Mars, some such technology is still active. If there is something moderately alive out there…"

"You want me to be able to take care of it."

"Correct." The general shrugged. "It's that or life in prison."

Danny blinked and shook his head furiously. "Gah! There are so many problems with this, I can't even believe it." He knew he was going to take the job, but it was too bizarre and strange. It was like finding out that Santa Claus existed after all.

"People have been looking at the stars for millennia. For the last two or three hundred years people have written and theorized about human life in space, and now it's finally happened, and, like you, nobody would be able to believe it." The general lowered his voice. "That's exactly why nobody has been told about it. The first attempt must succeed, or every one that follows will be mocked into extinction before it has even a chance of success. Imagine if we could take the focus of the world off its own pathetic disputes and put it into space. It would be the New World all over again."

Danny considered the things he'd learned in history about the New World. As he recalled, it had encouraged slavery, started wars, and caused the local people incredible amounts of strife. The United States had come out of it, so it hadn't been all bad, but the general's argument didn't sound as grand as it was made out to be. In spite of those doubts, the mission did have a strange appeal to Danny. He'd wanted to be an astronaut when he was little, and he couldn't say he was anxious to get to prison. Plus, it wasn't for him, a formerly dead man, to say what sounded strange. In a world as insane as his had always been, why not go to Mars and battle alien ghost things?

"Alright," he said. "I'll do it."

"Good man." The general grinned as he stood to dismiss him. "You transfer out at oh-five-hundred tomorrow."

* * *

A/N: Howzat for a doosie, eh? Remember, reviews make me giggle with childlike glee!  



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